RUBBED OUT
Friday, March 25 — The fact that pencils have erasers is supposed to indicate that no one is perfect. But it’s doubtful that people were perfect before this month in 1858. That’s when Hyman Lipman was granted a patent for a pencil with an incorporated rubber eraser. Lipman’s eraser could be sharpened, as it protruded from the wood sheath at the end opposite the graphite. The familiar wood-encased pencil dates back to 1662, when they were mass-produced in Nuremberg, Germany. More than 350 years on, and despite all of our electronic marvels, more than 14 billion pencils are produced globally every year. U.S. annual production is around 2 billion, and annual sales of pencils and art supplies comes to around $1.5 billion.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau
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