inventor - Austria / II. Republic of Austria 2015 - 80 Euro Cent

Born on February 13, 1758 in Asparn an der Zaya, Joseph Hardtmuth learned masonry, but was already engaged in his work as a teenager after finishing work on architecture and technical drawings. When he moved to Vienna years later, large orders were not long in coming. He became building director and architect of the princely family Liechtenstein, and his inventive spirit awakened more and more. At the end of the eighteenth century, among other things, he developed the Viennese stoneware, constructed a press that could produce bricks without using fuel, and invented an elastic slate that could be quenched with water. Of course, the idea for his greatest invention arose out of a simple necessity: for him, the architect and inventor, the pencil was one of his most important tools - but good pencils were expensive and had to be imported specially from England. For the conventional production of a pencil lead, graphite had to be crushed, sieved several times, mixed with sulfur or antimony, melted, cooled and cut to size; the result was usually fragile and inadequate. Hardtmuth, meanwhile, mixed the graphite with a plastic clay and used it to machine even mines, which were then fired. Through different mixing ratios and burning time, he also managed to produce pencils in different degrees of hardness. As a result, he founded a pencil factory and used only local raw materials for the production. The family business flourished quickly and soon the Viennese pencils were exported throughout Europe. Today, the now Czech company "Koh-i-Noor Hardtmuth" is one of the oldest pencil producers in the world and stands for first-class writing and artistic goods.