I left out one of the most important features of the pencil during tonight’s show… the eraser… and I’m not talking about the movie…
As Jean Paschke said in an article called “The Lowly Pencil” in the 2006 edition of The Alminac For Farmers and City Folk, “Although much earlier, in 1770, the rubber eraser had replaced breadcrumbs as a correction material, it wasn’t until 1858 that Hyman Lipman of Philadelphia made erasers standard equipment on pencils.”
How could I have neglected to mention erasers? I must have erased it by mistake…
There was one other quote in the article worth mentioning.
Henry Petroski wrote a book called, “A History of Design and Circumstance.” In it he talked about the most important feature of the pencil, “The very commonness of the pencil, the characteristic of it that renders it all but invisible and seemingly valueless, is really the first feature of the successfull engineering. Good engineering blends into the environment, becomes a part of society and culture so naturally that a special effort is required to notice it.”
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Don Jackson
