You know how you can spot all your typos and mistakes only after you print your document? Well, that’s been a problem long before the introduction of computers and printers. Ever since man first put pencil, ink, or paint to paper, parchment, or stone, mistakes were made, leaving folks looking for a way to fix their errors.
A colorized photo of a schoolgirl in 1970s London. (Photo by Albert Foster/Mirrorpix/Getty Images)
There were, prior to the 1770s, strange and mostly ineffective ways to erase the mistakes one made when writing on paper. But as we will see in these colorized photos, it was a mistake by one man, Edward Nairne, that led to the invention of the rubber eraser, the tool we have all used to undo our own mistakes.
Who Was Edward Nairne?
Edward Nairne dabbled in electrical inventions, but his invention of the rubber eraser was far simpler. (wikipedia)
Edward Nairne was born in England in 1726. Although he apprenticed to be an optician, he was also an inventor who tinkered around to make scientific instruments that were much more complex and sophisticated than the humble eraser. For example, using a glass tube and a register plate, he invented a working marine barometer that was used by explorer James Cook on his second South Pacific journey.
Nairne also patented an electrostatic generator that could supply either negative or positive electrical currents. This device was billed as a medical instrument and Nairne claimed the electrical current could aid in treating disorders like toothaches, bloodshot eyes, and epilepsy. Nairne made a telescope and a set of magnets that he sent to his pal, Benjamin Franklin in America in 1758. He was a member of the Royal Society of London and the American Philosophical Society. And he was also, apparently, a man who made numerous mistakes on paper.
Removing Ink and Graphite
There were methods for erasing words or drawings on writing material in the past. Wax was used to remove charcoal drawings and lead writing on paper. For documents written on parchment or papyrus, a piece of rough sandstone or pumice could sand off the error. The Japanese people discovered that ink could be soaked up from paper by blotting the mistake with a piece of bread. And then one could literally eat their mistakes.
Edward Nairne’s Mistaken Invention of the Eraser
A colorized photo of a 1960s stenographer writing with a pencil. (Photo by H. Armstrong Roberts/ClassicStock/Getty Images)
Taking a page from the Japanese, Edward Nairne had the habit of using bread and breadcrumbs to blot away his mistakes. As the story goes, Nairne was rushing through his writing one day in 1770 and mistakenly grabbed a chunk of rubber instead of a chunk of bread to remove his error. To his surprise, the rubber rubbed out the mistake! And it worked even better than his dinner roll.
All About Rubber
When Edward Nairne used the hunk of inedible organic matter to rub out his mistake, the material wasn’t yet known as rubber. It was technically called caoutchouc, or gum elastic. It was not like the rubber on your tire or at the end of your pencil today. It was crumbly, smelly, and prone to melting. Charles Goodyear – yes, that Goodyear – figured out that the tree gum was much more useful, stronger, and more malleable if it was cured through a process he invented called vulcanization.
Once Nairne realized that uncured rubber could erase mistakes, he got ahold of some cured, vulcanized rubber and began experimenting. It worked just as well. He began to sell small cubes of the natural rubber as erasers at the cost of 3 shillings for a half-inch cube. This was ridiculously high, yet people bought his erasers. Nairne referred to them as erasers, but his customers kept calling them rubbers, after the action of rubbing out the error. The name stuck and Goodyear’s vulcanized material became known by the generic term ‘rubber’.
Get to the Point
A colorized pic of a boy doing his homework in New York, 1952. (Photo by Graphic House/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
For the next 88 years, people had two separate items on their writing desks, a pencil and a chunk of rubber known as an eraser. In 1858, American Hymen Lipman was vexed because he kept losing his eraser. He hit on an idea. He affixed a small piece of rubber eraser to the end of his pencil, making it a two-on-one tool. Now, when he made a mistake while writing, he could simply flip his pencil over and rub out the error. Brilliant!
In 1858, Lipman applied for and received a patent for the pencil with eraser combo. When the item hit store shelves, the public loved them. The new pencils were sleek, modern, and handy. For a time, Lipman basked in the success of his invention, but then the patent office came calling to inform him that they had made a mistake. He should not be awarded his patent after all because he did not invent anything new. He merely put two existing items together. His patent was stripped away from him, opening the door for anyone to produce a pencil with an eraser tip, just like the one you used to take your SATs.
