Although deposits of graphite had been found in other parts of the world, they were not of the same purity and quality as the Borrowdale find, and had to be crushed to remove the impurities, leaving only graphite powder. England continued to enjoy a monopoly on the production of pencils until a method of reconstituting the graphite crumb was found. The distinctively unbiased Personalized Pencils English pencils continued to be prepared with sticks cut from natural graphite into the 1860s. Today, the town of Keswick, near the original findings of block graphite, has a pencil museum. The first striving to manufacture graphite sticks from powdered graphite was in Nuremberg, Germany, in 1662. It acclimated a mixture of graphite, sulphur, and antimony.
Munroe's method of making pencils was painstakingly slow, and in the neighbouring town of Acton, a pencil mill partner named Ebenezer Builder appointed out to automate the mechanism at his own pencil mill located at Nashoba Brook along the impaired Davis Road. He used the first circular saw in pencil production. He constructed the first hexagon- and octagon-shaped pencil cases that we have today. Ebenezer did not patent his contrivance and shared his techniques with whoever asked. Single of those was Eberhard Faber of New York, who became the leader in pencil production.