Before erasers, people used bread to rub out pencil marks.
The very first pencils arrived around the dawn of the 17th century, after graphite (the real name for the mineral that forms a pencil’s “lead”) was discovered in England's Lake District. But the eraser didn’t show up until the 1770s, at the tail end of the Enlightenment. So what filled the roughly 170-year-long gap? Look no further than the bread on your table. Back in the day, artists, scientists, government officials, and anyone else prone to making mistakes would wad up a small piece of bread and moisten it ever so slightly. The resulting ball of dough erased pencil marks on paper almost as well as those pink creations found on the end of No. 2 pencils today.
But in 1770, English chemist Joseph Priestly (best known for discovering oxygen) wrote about “a substance excellently adapted to the purpose of wiping from paper the marks of a black lead pencil.” This substance, then known as caoutchouc, was so perfect for “rubbing” out pencil marks that it soon became known simply as “rubber.” Even today, people in the U.K. still refer to erasers as “rubbers.” (The name “lead-eater” never quite caught on.)
When someone says “pencil,” a slender, yellow stylus topped with a pink eraser likely comes to mind — evidence that a 120-year-old ad campaign is still hard at work. In 1899, hoping to differentiate its pencils from the rest, a Czech manufacturing company named Hardtmuth Pencil decided to paint its “luxury pencil” yellow. At the time, painted pencils were usually red, purple, or black, since darker colors covered up imperfections. Yet Hardtmuth wanted to advertise its top-of-the-line graphite sourced from Siberia. The company went with yellow because of the color’s long association with royalty in China (Siberia's next-door neighbor). Soon, other companies followed suit, and the yellow pencil became ubiquitous around the world.
