Crayons

The first crayons were developed in Europe and probably consisted of a mixture of charcoal and oil. Later, wax was substituted for the oil, making the colored sticks sturdier, neater, and easier to handle.

In the early 1900s, Binney & Smith, a chemical company founded by cousins Edwin Binney and C. Harold Smith, began to produce slate pencils and a type of dustless chalk, An-Du-Septic, to meet the needs of a growing educational market. Soon, Binney and Smith realized that a new wax crayon they had developed to mark crates and boxes in their factory would provide a neater and more affordable alternative to costly imported crayons for American schools. They put their chemists to work at making the crayons non-toxic and easy to mass-produce.

In 1903, an assortment of affordable, multi-colored crayons was offered to the American public for the first time. The first Crayola crayons came in a box of eight and retailed for about five cents. The original colors were Black, Blue, Brown, Green, Orange, Red, Violet, and Yellow. The brand name Crayola was picked by Edwin Binney's wife, Alice. She attached the French word for chalk, craie, with ola," from oleaginous or oily.

The saga of Crayola's colors has been a long and eventful one. Forty new Crayola colors were introduced between 1949 and 1957, including Apricot, Carnation Pink, Cornflower, and Prussian Blue (later changed to Midnight Blue). Over the next 13 years, 16 new colors were added, including Lavender, Forest Green, and Mulberry, and the signature Crayola box grew to 64. That number increased to 72 in 1972 with the addition of fluorescent colors, first dubbed "Ultra" but later changed to more vivid names such as Atomic Tangerine, Outrageous Orange, and Screamin' Green.

After 1990, Crayola began "retiring" colors—including Green Blue, Lemon Yellow, and Raw Umber—and replacing them, to maintain a total of 80 colors. Though Binney and Smith probably never predicted that in a little over 90 years their company would be producing crayons in colors like Macaroni and Cheese, Tropical Rainforest, and Razzmatazz, these were in fact three of the 16 new colors added in 1993, all named by consumers.

Names of some colors were adjusted over the years to reflect changing sensibilities towards race and ethnicity. For example, the color Flesh was changed to Peach in 1962 with the rise of the Civil Rights movement. Similarly, Indian Red became Chestnut in 1999 after educators feared some children mistakenly thought the color was intended to represent the skin color of Native Americans. (It was actually based on a reddish-brown pigment found near India and often used in oil paints used by fine artists.)

By 2003, Crayola's 100th anniversary, 120 crayons were included in the deluxe Crayola box. Binney & Smith now produce nearly three billion crayons each year, or about seven million every day. That paraffin wax and colored pigment could make a crayon 37 feet wide and 420 feet long--higher than the Statue of Liberty. Crayola crayons are sold in more than 80 countries and packaged in 12 languages. Parents and schools purchase 2.5 billion crayons each year, and the average American child wears down about 730 crayons by the age of 10.

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