Thought Provoking Entropy | 10 Apr 2008
Pencil & Eraser
It’s been 150 years since the eraser attached itself to the pencil. We can only assume that Hymen Lipman was a man who made his fair share of mistakes, but we all benefited from them when he got a patent for sticking the eraser on the pencil, on this date in 1858. Lipman’s early version was a pencil with a groove at the top, into which he glued an eraser. He sold his patent in 1862; the US Supreme Court later invalidated it, saying that since combining a pencil with an eraser did not change the function of either item, the pencil-with-eraser could not be patented.
“The average pencil is seven inches long, with just a half-inch eraser — in case you thought optimism was dead.”
— Robert Brault