The Eraser On The End Of A Pencil Is Actually Called A “Plug” By Manufacturers

Correcting mistakes since 1770, National Rubber Eraser Day on April 15th commemorates the date the invention began making written errors disappear.

• 2000 BC – Scribes in ancient Mesopotamia correct mistakes on clay tablets by scraping off wet clay and smoothing the surface, an early example of “erasing” written records.
• 1st Century – In the Roman world, people wrote with a stylus on wax tablets and erased by smoothing the wax with the flat end of the stylus so the surface could be reused.
• Pre-1770 – Europeans commonly used soft bread crumbs, pumice, and even milk-soaked bread to rub out graphite and some ink marks from paper.
• 1770 – Joseph Priestly found a vegetable gum to remove pencil marks. He dubbed the substance “rubber.”  It wasn’t widely accepted. Priestly is the same guy who discovered oxygen in 1774.
• 1770 – Edward Nairne developed the first rubber eraser.  Nairne claimed to have come upon his invention accidentally: He inadvertently picked up a piece of rubber instead of breadcrumbs, he said, thereby realizing rubber’s erasing properties.
• 1839 – Charles Goodyear discovers vulcanization in 1839 and receives a U.S. patent in 1844 for treating natural rubber with sulfur and heat, greatly improving its stability and making rubber erasers practical and long-lasting.
• 1858 – Hyman Lipman (Philadelphia, Pa.) patented the pencil with an eraser at the end.
• 1932 – The electric eraser was invented in 1932 by Arthur Dremel of Racine, Wisconsin, USA.
• Erasers were once called lead eaters.
• An eraser by any other name? Originally, what we now call an eraser was referred to as a “rubber” because the tree resin it was made of “rubbed out” pencil marks. In Great Britain, they still use the original term.
• An eraser isn’t called an eraser by eraser manufacturers, either. Their name for the little erasers on pencil ends – “plugs!”
• What is an Indian rubber eraser? It has two parts — red for black or colored pencil markings and blue for erasing ink
• More and more of today’s erasers are made from something other than rubber! While some of the “pink” erasers you find on pencils are made from synthetic rubber blended with pumice (a grit that enhances its ability to erase), an increasing number of erasers are made from vinyl. Vinyl is a type of durable, flexible plastic.
• Even to this day, most pencils sold in Europe are eraser-less!
• One of the ingredients in erasers is a substance called pumice. The type of pumice used was primarily pink or red.
• The name ‘rubber’ comes from its rubbing action
• The Eberhard Faber Pencil Company brought the pink eraser to the world when it affixed the signature pink eraser to its pencils. Eventually, the company produced the pink pearl, a rectangular eraser that is still made today.
• In the United Kingdom, erasers are still known as rubbers.
• With erasers, you should be able to take the graphite off in 2 strokes
• Erasers are used for EVERYTHING:
  • Clean Your Pennies
  • Remove Sticky Price Tags
  • Remove Scribbling from Walls 
  • Clean your shoes
  • Remove scuff marks
  • To stick your pins 
• According to Guinness World Records, the world’s largest eraser collection contains 19,571 erasers. The collector, Petra Engles of Germany, has been collecting erasers for more than 25 years.

Sources:

National Day Calendar

Pencils

Kiddle

Erasers are Fun

The Atlantic

National Today