Thus great hopes filled the breast of the young man and impelled him to follow up the ideas and plans of life he had adopted with all his energy.
After a sojourn of three years in Paris there fell upon him suddenly and unexpectedly, on the midst of his labours, the news of the death of his father and after first performing a previously contemplated journey to London, in order to enrich his store of knowledge and experience, he returned to his native land in August 1839.
Now was the time to carry out and realise all the ideas he had imbibed. The condition of his father’s manufactory was, as before stated, extremely unsatisfactory. Scarcely twenty workmen were employed and the annual business done amounted only to about 12000 florins. If that glorious future, which the young man had assigned to the manufactory in his imagination at Paris was to become a fact, it would involve carrying on a conflict with all the old perverted notions, to break with the cumbersome progress of former times and upon the ruins of the Nürnberg trade, which beheld itself excluded from the world’s market, to lay the foundations of a new commerce, which alone would be able to reconquer for the venerable commercial city of Nürnberg her ancient renown.
He was the man, who brought, in the first place certainly only the pencil manufacture, but therewith also native industry in general, into direct contact with the ideas of foreign countries.
Sure and gradual progress was however indispensable. The new proprietor adopted the device of:
“Truth, Respectability, Industry”
as the fundamental principle of his dealings, being firmly convinced, that no human undertaking, which aspires to a future and lasting success, can possibly exist, if it in any respect be based upon untruth, or at variance with that, which passes for right and respectable among men in general or, which ignores the duty of unwearying activity and energetic industry. These principles seemed to him all the more indispensable for his manufactory as he, by his position, rendered himself to a certain extent responsible for the weal and woe of so many souls.
The two brothers of the new proprietor had been destined by their father for other modes of occupation, there being at that time no prospect of the pencil manufacture maintaining them.
The present proprietor of the manufactory however, feeling confident of the success of his comprehensive schemes, took to himself in the year 1840 his second youngest brother Johann Faber, who at that time carried on an Hotel at Prague, in order to unite his activity with his own.
The pencils were then only manufactured in proportionally few and cheap sorts, but the new proprietor of the manufactory was soon induced to introduce finer sorts at proportionate prices.