also, fucking pencil shavings?
pencil shavings contain graphite (great for getting into shit and shorting shit out) and thin paper (think, kindling)
did the russians gnaw the fucking things sharp? no? idiots…
Grease pencil, you pull a tab and the things unrolls.
nice alternative, and that’d make great sense except… now you have a bunch of long strings of grease covered paper floating about the cabin.
so no. no thanks.
No I mean that’s literally what they were using not graphite.
having used grease pencils before, no thanks, due to the remainder of greasy paper you unwind as you use it.
They aren’t suggesting using a grease pencil as a better alternative to a graphite pencil, they are saying that the Russian cosmonauts used grease pencils before moving to a pressurized pen.
You don’t need to say “no thanks” to it, no one is suggesting using it. The first comment was ambiguous, but your response to this one is just baffling.
no thanks.
I’m pretty sure astronauts are trained on the usage of garbage receptacles.
side note, mechanical grease pencils are literally some of the best goddamn marking tools ever invented by humans, and the fact that we’ve moved away from them as a standard in favor of sharpie-style disposible markers is APPALLING.
there’s myriad “industrial” markers you can buy, which are generally especially well suited to one specific inclement situation. low temp markers won’t freeze, but will often bleed and feather. oil-proof markers will write on a slippery surface, but will smear and take ages to dry proper (RIP lefties). paint markers can write on anything, but only as long as the surface doesn’t immediately destroy your nib and prevent future wicking.
grease pencils (quality ones at least) go down like a crayon, stick to ANYTHING, and generally won’t smear at all. obviously no one should be writing their thesis with one, but they can do pretty much everything we use permanent markers for. they’re also cheaper and produce far less waste.
as far as i can tell the biggest downside is there’s a smaller profit margin for the manufacturers.
Im a fan of grease pencils yeah, especially for marking on windows. I’m a mechanic and sometimes I just do the diag notes on the cars Windows or if laziness.
I love my grease pencils and use them for writing kitchen leftover contents on glass and ceramic dishes. This works like a dream when the dish is warm and just fine when the dish is room temperature.
However, it’s nearly impossible to write on cold or frozen dishes. In my old lab when was young and stupid, I’d hold the spot I wanted to write on over a flame for a few seconds (lucky I never exploded a liter of expensive research water and glass on myself, or worse). Now I do my best with vigorously rubbing the spot with a kitchen towel for a few seconds, but still usually get a barely readable mark.
Aside from figuring out how to etch those little white squares that lab glassware has onto my kitchen dishes, anyone have any ideas around this?
maybe a difference in the actual composition of the grease? i was writing on polished stainless pots at below freezing temps, but i was ALSO using new-old-stock refills bc the current standard size is it’s own proprietary can of worms lol
Huh. Never occurred to me they likely come in different compositions for different uses.
also you can etch those lil white squares surprisingly easily with commercially available glass etching creams, my mom used to fuck around with em a lot in like the 90’s i think.
oh god oh fuck what have you done do you understand how many niche DIY toolkits I have now I’m forced to add another
edit: oh wait it’s just one bottle. what’s one more bottle of engineering goo? 🫠
…when your budget is infinite vs when you just want to blast someone into space
Both superpowers had effectively infinite budgets for the space programs. The difference is, America’s was subject to Congress. The Soviet program was subject to the Party.
And Paul Fisher really just wanted to make a cool pen that can reliably write upside down. Congress and The Party agreed that the pen was cool and bought a couple hundred each.
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Conversation starter, or an entire episode of Seinfeld
Both? Yes, both, both is good.
TAKE THE PEN
The reason not to use pencils in Space wasn’t that Pencil are inflamable, the main reason was the graphit dust produced by Pencils, which because of the lack of gravity, enter floating in the electronic, causing short circuits as main risk.
Probably not great for eyes or noses or filtration systems either
Twist: you’re the filtration system.
I guess we are in a way a filtration system that removes oxygen from the air…
Ok there Ongo Baglogian
That is something I found weird, too. Inflammable and flammable mean the same thing!
Flammable isn’t a word.
Just Americans got confused by it so it became a word.
So then it is a word
A word made for stupid people, yes.
United States education system
It makes more sense if you think of it as enflammable. Indent and indebted at examples of this “in-” prefix. https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/flammable-or-inflammable
If you want to keep things crystal clear, choose flammable when you are referring to something that catches fire and burns easily, and use the relatively recent nonflammable when referring to something that doesn’t catch fire and burn easily. Inflammable is just likely to enflame confusion.
The people at Merriam are alright 👌
Technically, I think they’re different. Flammable means that it can be lit on fire, like wood or something. Whereas inflammable means it can catch fire on its own, like gas, for example.
Edit: after some googling, it appears that my source was shit and should be disregarded. They do indeed appear to be synonyms. And also, I was thinking of gasoline. I think I was thinking of the “gas pedal” and that threw me off.
Synonyms, true synonyms. No real difference between them (except don’t use inflammable in safety situations, for above reasons)
saying that “gas” is able to catch fire on its own is stretching it :) A gas mix typically still needs a spark, unlike: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypergolic_propellant <- that stuff can “catch fire” on its own. But even there - it needs to be mixed, so technically, one component requires the other to ignite.
Yeah, my bad, shit example.
Credit to you for the self-correction though
Also a broken bit of lead could easily float into someone’s eye or get aspirated.
There is no way either side used lead pencils. Saying lead is in pencils is a very outdated thing, it’s all graphite these days.
it hasn’t been graphite for while now either….
Chalk isn’t chalk?
Regular chalk is calcium carbonate. Crayola’s website says their sidewalk chalk uses calcium sulfate (gypsum as an ingredient in plaster of paris).
So they’re both calcium salts.
no
A sharp piece of graphite from a broken pencil is not something you would want in your eyes either
This is the most upvotes I think I have ever seen on a comment here.
and thin paper shavings = space kindling. the entire argument is fucking dumb.
perhaps the sovs gnawed their pencils sharp and consumed all the graphite fragments and shavings lol. good lil soviet space beavers
The Soviets were using grease pencils IIRC before also switching to the Fisher Space Pen around 1969. The grease pencil eliminated the risk of graphite floating around but the writing quality isn’t great.
If I remember correctly, the Soviet engines were a lot harder to short out, so pencils weren’t as big a problem in their spacecraft.
the Soviet engines were a lot harder to short out,
bwahaha this is idiotic. anyone familiar with the long litany of rocket failures out of baiknor knows their engines weren’t ‘harder to short out’ whatever silly shit you mean with it.
short out what? the alternator? bwahahahahaahahahaha
short out the fuse box? dear god, I’m dying here
Genuine question. why did you choose to use “inflammable” instead of “flammable”?
Lapsus
lapis
Skamtebord
Oh dear, the internet is leaking again… Call the locksmith 🗣️
inflammation, inflamed, inflammable
inflammable = easily ignited
Inflame was the original word for ‘to ignite’ - to set aflame, to set on fire. We still see if in metaphor, ‘inflammatory argument’ or ‘inflamed passion’, for example.
So an inflammable object was one you can inflame (or enflame). The word ‘flammable’ came about later, probably to reduce confusion for people who thought it mean ‘un-flameable’.
These days we use flammable on labels for safety reasons, but inflame is still peppered throughout language in metaphor and medicine, and both are correct.
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Nope. 100% O2 can’t burn on its own. Other things in 100% O2 on the other hand…
That wasn’t the problem. The problem was graphite fragments floating around until they hit something with a charge to it, and then they shorted important systems.
I have one on my keychain, highly recommend
americans trying to save the political devision in 2025
I got big into pens for a bit before settling on my edc one-size-fits-most pen. During my travels, I saw that the Fisher Space pens are still highly regarded as great writers even for us grounded folk. Yeah, there’s better, but for the size and build quality they’re great options. I went with the Ti Arto by Big Idea Design instead. Just so I could use basically any pen cartridges (except cheap bic roller ball).
Huh, the Arto used to be 70usd. I’d say not worth anymore. I got the black one and the paint has already chipped plus the clip is not titanium unless you buy an expensive “premium” clip.
“Do me a personal favour. Take the pen!”
This is inaccurate. Graphite is not flammable. It forms small particles that, mixed with air, could combust in a dust explosion, just like flour.
I’m probably just being dense but what’s the difference between being flammable and being susceptible to combustion?
They’re referring to the relationship between surface area and combustion. Talc, for example, melts but does not burn. Talc powder can ignite if blown over an open flame.
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My first thought was: “I must try this”. I need to read my house insurance policy first.
Curiosity got the better of me when I waved an alcohol wipe over an open flame. There’s still a dark mark on the office carpet tile from where I had to stamp it out.
Let it be someone else’s carpet. Or in this case, driveway.
Skip to 3:10 for the action.
Please invest in a fire blanket and keep it near by when you do stupid things with fire.
Signed, a fellow fire bug
Mine paid for itself the first time a flame got out of control while I was having some fun. No lasting burns to human or objects in my office lol.
Keep away from dust explosions, they are very uncontrollable because they ignite very fast and produce a lot of heat. It’s technically not an explosion, but it definitely is an easy way to burn your house down.
Mythbusters did this with coffee whitener as I recall. Impressive.
This has also happened to sawmills and flour mills, under less controlled circumstances.
You misgendered round spicy flames
In technical safety terms, combustibles are harder to ignite than flammables. So diesel and olive oil are combustibles, for example, because neither of them give off enough ignitable vapour at room temperature. Ethanol does, so it gets classified as flammable, and you need to store and handle it more carefully than diesel. Then there’s really horrible stuff like triethylborane which will catch fire upon meeting oxygen even at temperatures well below the freezing point of water
Of course in casual usage they mean the same thing
You’re not dense for asking a question. Without asking questions, it’s Impossible to learn.
The flash point is different. The flash point is the temperature that is necessary to create enough vapor for the substance to ignite.
Flammable material has a low flash point, which means it catches on fire easily. Think gasoline. Combustibles need a higher initial temperature, but eventually they will burn and sustain the burning until running out. Think wood.
Makes perfect sense, thank you
Wood.
Wood is also combustible. You need a lot of heat to make wood burn. Hold a lighter to your pencil, it will not instantly catch fire, do the same with paper and you need a water bucket nearby.
Yeah, try lighting your pencil on fire in a 100% O2 environment. It’s not the pencil being flammable that was dangerous, it was the pure oxygen atmosphere making the pencil extremely flammable to the point where a small spark from static electricity could cause it to almost instantly immolate, that made it dangerous.
Finer bits of wood, like sawdust, or pencil shavings from sharpening, catch fire much more readily than a solid chunk of wood like a whole pencil.
Given the right environment, finer sawdust can even be explosive.
A lot of campers and other outdoorsy types are probably familiar with using “feather sticks” to start a fire, where you take a stick and cut a bunch of fine curls into it, almost like you’re whittling down the stick but leaving the shavings attached.
The whole stick wouldn’t readily catch fire, but those finer curls attached to it will light pretty easily and spread to the rest of the stick.
And while I’ve seen some pretty impressive feather sticks made by people with a steady hand and sharp knife, most of the time those feathers aren’t quite as fine as most pencil shavings.
Sharpen the pencil and create a bunch of tiny shavings then put them in a pure O² environment. They’ll light up real fast.
Tbe Apollo 1 fire spread so quickly because in a pure O² environment fucking velcro was super flammable.
Let us just note that this would be impossible when using it to write something.
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I don’t know where you got any of this, your comment makes the least sense of anyone in this post, and some of these people are actually wrong
Well now I’m incredibly disappointed that I can’t see what it was
NASA used crayons before those space pens, and iirc the pens were available for a while before they tried them
NASA used crayons before those space pens, and iirc the pens were available for a while before they tried them
this is partially correct; the missing pertinent bit - there was a crayon shortage due to the influx of marines recruited for the vietnam war (mmm crayola), forcing NASA to seek alternatives.
Also you DON’T FUCKING WANT GRAPHITE DUST FLOATING AROUND IN ZERO G
Why not? I’m not well versed in the theme. Would it be flammable?
edit: just saw another post mentioning this: lack of gravity, enter floating in the electronic, causing short circuits as main risk.
Also your body doesn’t do a good job of breaking it down either. Id imagine that in your lungs would suck.
I have a piece of graphite in my leg from 7th grade still. I’m 33.
I have a graphite stain in my palm from 8th grade and I’m 40.
Left handed or did you get stabbed too?
Got stabbed by a friend at lunch.
The theme is to pretend recently-learned information was available half a century ago, and also to ignorantly inflate its importance. It turns out exposure to graphite dust in large concentrations can cause respiratory problems (like any kind of dust), but the amount of graphite emitted into the air by pencil use is insignificant, even in zero gravity.
Plus pressurized pens are useful in more than just zero-g. I used to use one along with a waterproof note pad for note taking in the field. They’re also not prohibitively expensive, although the ones from Fisher itself carry a pretty huge brand name markup, other companies sell them for a couple bucks each.
They’re also great to bust open when scared, to make a quick getaway. Making zoidberg noises as you scuttle away is optional, but recommended.
Wait…waterproof notepad?! How does a notepad hold the moisture from the pen? Or is this like a grease marker situation?
idk how it works but it does. I’ve been using Rite in the Rain for years but there are others too if you search it up.
Just guessing here but I imagine the ink doesn’t contain any water, so an otherwise absorbent material that is treated with a hydrophobic coating would probably work for that.
the paper doesnt necessarily need to absorb the ink, the ink just needs to dry on the surface is such a way that it adheres well enough it doesn’t rub off, or stay wet.
So really, you want a high adhesion, quick drying ink, which would basically let you write on any surface it’ll stick to.
Empires wasting resources on nonflammable space pens while the whole planet burns.
Technically correct. i guess, money better spent elsewhere
Think of how revolutionary crayola twistables would have been for NASA?
So they could have infinite chunks of broken crayan floating around them. I can never not break those no matter how lite I use rhem
The air filters would capture it eventually. It’s not like the ISS has dead air.
You’re assuming I wouldn’t try to eat them all like floating packman
Well, then the problem would be solved anyways!
Fair enough. But I just needed someone else to have the imagery I had.
You’re the kid I stopped sharing my colours with.
Oh shit wassup
![[Partially incorrect, see comments.] Pens in Space](https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/466a2af6-4d33-4f93-aa6c-eaaf49ab899f.jpeg){kind=link}