Pink+Blue Eraser

True-ish Tales of Stationery Icons

Hello pink/blue eraser. May I ask you a personal question? Why are you so iconic? And why the two-tone?  You look cool and everything but you’re not very good at your job.

Before the rubber eraser, people just used their sandwiches to remove pencil marks. Yup. Breadcrumbs were just rolled around on paper, making everything a little greasy.

One day in 1770 an English engineer (Edward Nairne) reached for his sandwich while correcting his calculations and grabbed a piece of natural rubber from his desk instead. Realising that the rubber was far more effective than his breadcrumbs (!) he began selling them as part of his side-hustle.

 It wasn’t until much later that the pink/blue eraser made its way into schools around the world.  The pink side was created by adding pink volcanic pumice to the rubber, to make it more abrasive.   And the blue side is a little more controversial. I’m not sure if it was our parents who lied to us, or school folklore, but the blue side is not for ink!  No! Which would explain why it was so very terrible at rubbing out my blue Bic! 

 It was, in fact, designed to remove pencil from heavy stock papers, like sketchbooks.   I mean, really? Why weren’t we told?