I don’t know anyone who didn’t grow up with Crayola products in their home – do you? So let’s take a look at the company’s history and background.
Founded by cousins Edwin Binney and C. Harold Smith in New York City on March 31, 1885 as Binney & Smith, the partners’ experimentation with industrial materials, including slate waste, cement, and talc, led to the invention of the first dustless white chalk.
After that they developed and introduced the Staonal marking crayon.
However, in June of 1903, Edwin and his wife Alice Stead Binney developed their own line of wax crayons, which they sold under the name Crayola. The name came from “craie,” French for chalk, and “ola” for oleaginous or oily.
By 1905, the line had expanded to include 18 different sized crayon boxes with five different sized crayons, only two of which survive today – the “standard size” (35⁄8” × 5/16″) and the “large size” (4″ × 7/16″). Some of these boxes were targeted to artists and contained crayons with no wrappers, while others had a color number printed on the wrapper that corresponded to a number on a list of color names printed inside the box lid, and others contained crayons with their color names printed on their wrappers. The boxes sold from five cents to $1.50.
In April 1904 at the St. Louis World’s Fair, Binney & Smith won the Gold Medal for their An-Du-Septic dustless chalk. Subsequently, the company’s new marketing strategy was to include the gold medal on the front of many of their products. It was so successful, that for the next 50 years it was on the front of every package they produced.
Binney & Smith purchased the Munsell Color Company crayon product line in 1926, and inherited 22 new colors. They retained the Munsell name on products such as “Munsell-Crayola” and “Munsell-Perma” until 1934, and then incorporated their colors into their own Crayola Gold Medal line of boxes.
In 1939, Crayola combined its existing crayon colors with the Munsell colors and introduced the “Crayon 52 Color Assortment.” Further expansion took place in 1958 with the introduction of the 64-color pack that included the company’s first crayon sharpener built into the box.
Crayola markers were introduced in 1978 to coincide with the 75th anniversary of Crayola crayons. Colored pencils and a line of washable markers were added in 1987.
Crayola Crayons were inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame in 1998. The same year, the Crayola Factory opened.
In 2011, My First Crayola was launched. Products include triangular crayons and flat-tipped markers.
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I can’t forget how excited I was when the newspaper came and I smashed my silly putty onto the comics and slowly rolled it back to see the picture on my Silly Putty. Then I stretched in every way I could until it was so thin that you had to roll it up and start all over!!
During World War II, Japan invaded rubber-producing countries as they expanded their sphere of influence in the Pacific Rim. Rubber was vital for the production of rafts, tires, vehicle and aircraft parts, gas masks, and boots. In the U.S., all rubber products were rationed; citizens were encouraged to make their rubber products last until the end of the war and to donate spare tires, boots, and coats. Meanwhile, the government funded research into synthetic rubber compounds to attempt to solve this shortage.
Credit for the invention of Silly Putty is disputed and has been attributed variously to Earl Warrick, of the then newly formed Dow Corning; Harvey Chin; and James Wright, a Scottish inventor working for General Electric in New Haven, Connecticut.