Deadly Pencils of Yesteryear

See, you think you’ve totally exhausted a topic and then a new and exciting avenue of inquiry opens up and you’re inundated with a welcome flood of useless knowledge. I was considering how old-timey telegraph guys were always shown licking their pencils and I remembered a thing my dad had called an indelible pencil. I looked that up and what it is is there’s dye mixed into the pencil lead and you can wet it and it soaks into the paper and you can’t erase it. They’re rarely used now for two reasons: We got ballpoints. The dye was poison.