I’m fascinated with the early Twentieth-century zeal for electrifying on a regular basis issues. Hand instruments, toasters, hot combs—all of them clearly benefited from the jolt of electrification. However the eraser? What was so problematic in regards to the humble eraser that it wanted electrifying?
Numerous issues, it turned out. Based on Hermann Lukowski in his 1935 patent application for an equipment for erasing, “Hand-held rubbers are clumsy and canopy a higher space than could also be required.” Aye, there’s the rub, because it had been. Lukowski’s cone-tipped electrical eraser, he argued, may higher deal with the high quality element.
An electrical eraser is also a timesaver. Within the days earlier than computer-aided drawing and the convenience of the delete and undo instructions, manually erasing a doc may very well be a fragile operation.
Think about the cautious method Roscoe C. Sloane and John M. Montz counsel of their 1930 e-book Elements of Topographic Drawing. To make a correction to a map, these civil engineering professors at Ohio State University advocate the next steps:
- With a clean, sharp knife decide the ink from the paper. This may be accomplished with out marring the floor.
- Place a tough, clean floor, corresponding to a [drafting] triangle, beneath the erasure earlier than rubbing begins.
- When virtually all of the ink has been eliminated with the knife, rub with a pencil eraser.
Erasing was not for the faint of coronary heart!
A Transient Historical past of the Eraser
The place did the eraser get its begin? The British scientist Joseph Priestley is well known for his discovery of oxygen and in no way celebrated for his discovery of the eraser. Round 1766, whereas engaged on The History and Present State of Electricity, he discovered himself having to attract his personal illustrations. First, although, he needed to be taught to attract, and since any new artist naturally makes errors, he additionally wanted to erase.
In 1766 or thereabouts, Joseph Priestley found the erasing properties of pure rubber.Alamy
Alas, there weren’t lots of nice choices for erasing on the time. For objects drawn in ink, he may use a knife to scrape away errors; pumice or different tough stones is also used to abrade the web page and take away the ink. To erase pencil, the customary strategy was to make use of a bit of bread or bread crumbs to softly grind the graphite off the web page. The entire strategies had been problematic. With out excessive care, it was straightforward to break the paper. Utilizing bread was additionally messy, and because the author and artist John Ruskin allegedly stated, a waste of completely good bread.
Because the story goes, Priestley at some point by chance grabbed a bit of caoutchouc, or pure rubber, as a substitute of bread and found that it may erase his errors.
Priestley might have found this attribute of rubber, however Edward Nairne, an inventor, optician, and scientific-instrument maker, marketed it on the market. For 3 shillings (about at some point’s wages for a talented tradesman), you possibly can buy a half-inch (1.27-cm) dice of the fabric. Priestley acknowledged Nairne within the preface of his 1770 tutorial on how to attract, A Familiar Introduction to the Theory and Practice of Perspective, noting that caoutchouc was “excellently tailored to the aim of wiping from paper the marks of a black-lead-pencil.” By the late 1770s, cubes of caoutchouc had been generally called rubbers or lead-eaters.
Pure rubber is perhaps good for erasing, nevertheless it isn’t essentially an merchandise you need sitting in your desk. This can be very delicate to temperature, turning into onerous and brittle within the chilly and mushy and gummy within the warmth. Over time, it inevitably degrades. And worst of all, it turns into smelly.
What was so problematic in regards to the humble eraser that it wanted electrifying?
Fortunately, there have been a lot of different folks searching for methods to enhance pure rubber, and in 1839 Charles Goodyear developed the vulcanization course of. By including sulfur to pure rubber after which heating it, Goodyear found easy methods to stabilize rubber in a agency state, what we might name immediately the thermosetting of polymers. In 1844 Goodyear patented a course of to create rubber cloth. He went on to make rubber sneakers and different merchandise. (The tire company that bears his identify was based by the brothers Charles and Frank Seiberling a number of a long time later.) Goodyear sadly died penniless, however we did get a greater eraser out of his discovery.
Who Actually Invented the Electrical Eraser?
Albert Dremel, who opened his eponymous company in 1932, usually will get credit score for the invention of the electrical eraser, but when that’s true, I can discover no definitive proof. Out of greater than 50 U.S. patents held by Dremel, none are for an electrical eraser. Actually, different inventors might have a greater declare, corresponding to Homer G. Coy, who filed a patent for an electrified automatic eraser in 1927, or Ola S. Pugerud, who filed a patent for a rotatable electric eraser in 1906.
The Dremel Moto-Device, launched in 1935, got here with an array of swappable bits. One model may very well be used as an electrical eraser.Dremel
In 1935 Dremel did come out with the Moto-Tool, the world’s first handheld, high-speed rotary device that had interchangeable bits for sanding, engraving, burnishing, and sharpening. One version of the Moto-Device was offered as an electrical eraser, though it was held extra like a hammer than a pencil.
No matter who invented the system, electrical erasers had been positively available on the market by 1929. Among the earliest adopters had been librarians, particularly those that maintained and needed to incessantly replace the cardboard catalog. Margaret Mann, an affiliate professor of library science on the College of Michigan, listed an electrical eraser as really helpful gear in her 1930 e-book Introduction to Cataloging and the Classification of Books. She described a flat, spherical rubber eraser mounted on a motor-driven instrument much like a dentist’s drill. The eraser may take away typewriting and print from catalog playing cards with out leaving a tough look. By 1937, discussions of electrical erasers had been a part of the library science curriculum at Columbia University. Electrical erasers had gone mainstream.
To erase pencil, the customary strategy was to make use of a bit of bread to softly grind the graphite off the web page.
In 1930, the Charles Bruning Co.’s basic catalog had six pages of erasers and equipment, with two pages dedicated to the corporate’s electrical erasing machine. Bruning, which specialised in engineering, drafting, and surveying provides, additionally supplied quite a lot of nonelectrified eraser merchandise, together with metal erasers (often known as desk knives), eraser shields (used to isolate the realm to be erased), and a chisel-shaped eraser to placed on the tip of a pencil.
The Loren Specialty Manufacturing Co. arrived late to the electrical eraser recreation, introducing its first such product in 1953. Held within the hand like a pen or pencil, the Presto electrical eraser would vibrate to abrade a small space in want of correction. The corporate spun off the Presto model in 1962, in regards to the time the Presto Model 80 [shown at top] was produced. This specific unit was utilized by officer employees on the New York Life Insurance Co. and is now housed on the Smithsonian’s Cooper Hewitt.
The Creativity of the Eraser
Once I was rising up, my dad stored an electrical eraser subsequent to his drafting desk. I beloved enjoying with it, nevertheless it wasn’t till I started researching this text that I spotted I had been utilizing all of it fallacious. The professionals know you’re imagined to form the cylindrical rubber into a degree with a purpose to erase high quality strains.
At the moment virtually all draftsmen, librarians, and workplace employees have gone digital, however some visible artists nonetheless use electrical erasers. One in all them is artist and educator Darrel Tank, who makes a speciality of pencil drawings. I watched a number of of his surprisingly fascinating videos evaluating varied fashions of electrical erasers. Seeing Tank use his favourite electrical eraser to create texture on clothes or motion in hair made me understand that drawing is not only an additive course of. Generally it’s what’s eliminated that makes the distinction.
– YouTube
Susan Piedmont-Palladino, an architect and professor at Virginia Tech’s Washington-Alexandria Structure Heart, has additionally thought quite a bit about erasing. She curated the exhibit “Instruments of the Creativeness: Drawing Instruments and Applied sciences from the Eighteenth Century to the Current” on the National Building Museum in 2005 and authored the companion e-book of the identical title. Piedmont-Palladino describes architectural design as a protracted strategy of doing, undoing, and redoing, deciding which concepts can keep and which should go.
Piedmont-Palladino writes lovingly of a not-too-distant previous, the place this design course of was captured in a constructing’s plans. When the architect was drafting by hand, the paper itself grew to become a report of misery, displaying the place it had been scraped, erased, and redrawn. You could possibly see factors of uncertainty and factors of decisiveness. However immediately, when virtually all architectural drawing is finished on a pc, customers delete as a substitute of erase. With just a few keystrokes, an object can disappear, transfer to a different spot, or miraculously reappear from the trash can. The design course of is now not etched into the web page.
In fact, the pencil, the eraser (electrical or not), and the pc are all simply instruments for transmitting and visualizing concepts. The instruments of any age replicate society in ways in which aren’t all the time clear till new instruments come to exchange them. Each the pencil and the eraser needed to be invented, and it’s as much as historians to ensure they aren’t forgotten.
A part of a continuing seriestaking a look at historic artifacts that embrace the boundless potential of know-how.
An abridged model of this text seems within the April 2025 print challenge as “When Electrification Got here for the Eraser.”
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