Most students, if asked, will confess that they hate history. I get their point, but wonder if it’s history they hate or the mind numbing way it is often taught: dates to memorize, forgettable greats from too long ago and such. Chemistry and biology did the same thing for me: no mixing things together to see what happens or microscopes to discover frightening creatures with, just valences and phyla to memorize. At least that was my experience a century ago.
History for me though, when I dig around, can, as Marie Kondo says, “spark joy.” Today proved just such a day, because I learned that on this day in 1858, Hymen Lipman patented the invention of pencils with attached erasers. Yes, there was a time when such a thing was not at all obvious and, in fact, brand new. My great-grandparents must have marveled at the first one they held and at the genius of the idea. Even as long as we’ve enjoyed and appreciated pencils with erasers (there seems to be no one word to use for them), it took 150 years or so to come up with erasable pens, or at least to perfect them. Liquid Paper for typewriters came along sooner, only 100 years later, thanks to Bette Nesmith Graham, who to some is better known as the mother of Michael Nesmith of the Monkees. The inventor of typewriters with correctable ribbons seems to have been lost in the scrapheap of time along with all the many manual and later electric typewriters that once populated office desks and punctuated the sound of business at work. Now we even have styluses with electronic erasers on the otherwise non-working end.
But for today I celebrate Hymen Lipman, whose name I misspelled in drafting this, but thanks to his genius, was able to correct.
