Before rubber erasers: how did people erase pencil marks?

Before rubber erasers, the usual tool for removing pencil marks was bread, specifically crustless bread worked into a ball or crumbs. Around 1770 the English optician and instrument maker Edward Nairne sold the first widely available rubber erasers in Europe. No single person invented the eraser outright, because others had noticed rubber's erasing ability around the same time. [1] [2]

The Atlantic describes the bread eraser as de-crusted, moistened and balled up. It was cheap and plentiful, but like all bread it was prone to mold and rot. A 1908 photography magazine quoted by Snopes also describes kneading a piece of bread crumb about the size of a walnut until it is like dough and using it like a piece of rubber. [3] [1]

Other materials served other writing surfaces. Wax tablets were used to remove lead or charcoal marks, and rough stones such as sandstone or pumice were used to scrape small errors from parchment or papyrus. Wikipedia notes that bread erasers were still given to students in Japan's Meiji period, when some pupils reportedly ate the firm parts to ease their hunger. [4] [2]

Edward Nairne is credited with developing and marketing the first rubber eraser in Europe. By his own account, he reached for breadcrumbs, picked up a piece of rubber by mistake, and found that it worked better. Until then the material was known as gum elastic or by the French name caoutchouc. Nairne sold small cubes of it at three shillings for a half-inch cube. [4] [1] [2]

Snopes rates the popular meme about Nairne a mixture of true and false, because others had drawn attention to rubber earlier. In the first half of the eighteenth century, French scientists reported rubber to the French Academy after seeing South American peoples use it, and one of them, Francois Fresneau, wrote about its commercial importance in 1751. On April 15, 1770, the chemist Joseph Priestley described a substance excellently adapted to wiping the mark of black-lead pencil from paper, and noted that Nairne sold it. The word rubber is said to have attached to the material between 1770 and 1778. [1] [4]

Raw rubber perished easily. Charles Goodyear's vulcanization process of 1839 made rubber more durable, and rubber erasers became common afterward. On March 30, 1858, Hymen Lipman of Philadelphia received the first patent for attaching an eraser to a pencil's end, though it was later invalidated as a mere combination of two existing devices. [4] [2]