100 Fun Facts About Crayola!

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And now for a taste of childhood...

http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/6608083.htm

Pigments of our imagination

Crayola has been brightening the scenery of childhood for 100 years. To mark the Easton, Pa., company's colorful legacy, here's a rainbow of fun facts.

By Jeff Gammage
Inquirer Staff Writer

EASTON, Pa. - When you step out onto the factory floor, the first thing you notice is the familiar smell.

It's the distinctive whiff of wax, a scent dyed bright with color.

It smells like childhood.

It's an old smell, largely unchanged in 100 years.

Back in 1864, with the Civil War still raging, a man named Joseph Binney founded the Peekskill Chemical Works in New York. His company made charcoal and lampblack, a carbon pigment used to darken the natural cream-white of rubber tires. When his business grew, he moved the headquarters to New York City.

Binney retired in 1885, and his son, Edwin, and nephew, C. Harold Smith, formed a partnership called Binney & Smith. They produced a red dye used in barn paint, an attractive business in agrarian America.

Five years later, in 1900, Binney & Smith purchased a mill here and began making slate pencils. Then they started manufacturing dustless chalk for schoolchildren.

In talking to teachers, they learned that educators were desperate for safe and affordable wax crayons. The crayons imported from Europe were too expensive.

Coincidentally, the company had just developed a new crayon for marking crates and barrels. So the Binney & Smith chemists began searching for ways to replace that crayon's toxic pigments with safe, synthetic dyes. And they changed the wax-mixing technique to handle a range of colors.

In 1903, a year after incorporating here, the company produced its first orange-and-green box of eight Crayola crayons. Both the size of the box and the breadth of the color spectrum grew steadily through the years.

Today, as the Crayola crayon celebrates its centennial, we offer 100 colorful facts:


1. Crayola makes about 3 billion crayons a year.

2. That's about 12 million crayons every workday.

3. When the first box of Crayola crayons went on sale in 1903, it had eight colors: black, brown, orange, violet, blue, green, red and yellow.

4. The box cost a nickel.

5. Today, the same box includes the same eight colors.

6. It costs $1.25.

7. America's favorite Crayola color, chosen through an online poll, is (ta-da!) blue.

8. To the Cherokee Indians, blue represents failure.

9. It's worked out OK for the Toronto Blue Jays, St. Louis Blues and Columbus Blue Jackets.

10. Not to mention Carl Perkins, who wrote "Blue Suede Shoes," or Fats Domino, who wrote "Blueberry Hill," and of course, Elvis, who starred in Blue Hawaii and sang the title song.

11. Sixteen of America's 50 favorite crayon colors - and six of its Top 10 - are shades of blue: blue, cerulean, midnight blue, aquamarine, periwinkle, denim, blizzard blue, cornflower, blue green, Pacific blue, indigo, sky blue, Navy blue, robin egg blue, teal blue, blue bell.

12. Finishing 50th among 50: laser lemon.

13. Dreaming about the color yellow symbolizes a struggle to achieve.

14. The Brooklyn Dodgers experimented with a yellow baseball, "a stitched lemon," before returning to white.

15. To the human eye, black on yellow creates the strongest contrast. That's why the combination is used for traffic signs.

16. Crayola crayons come in 120 colors, including 23 reds, 20 greens, 19 blues, 16 purples, 14 oranges, 11 browns and 8 yellows.

17. From 1903 until 1943, when a machine was invented to do the job, each and every label had to be rolled onto each and every crayon by hand.

18. The glue on the label is made of cornstarch and water.

19. You can eat it if you want.

20. The name Crayola was coined by Alice Binney, the wife of the company founder. She combined craie, French for "chalk," and ola, short for oleaginous.

21. Oleaginous means "oily."

22. The average child in the United States will wear down 730 crayons by his 10th birthday.

23. Those stubs are informally known as "Leftolas."

24. Luckily, the company sells a $24.99 toy, the Crayola Crayon Maker, that melts down nubs and remolds them into new, multicolored crayons.

25. Phoenix artist Douglas Mehrens uses more crayons than anyone in the world, melting down about 24,000 a year to make his abstract works.

26. Britney Spears' favorite crayon color is robin egg blue.

27. President Bush likes blue bell.

28. There are no crayons named after people.

29. At least two people, however, have the first name Crayola: Crayola Walker, of Bellow Falls, Vt., and Crayola Collins, of Pulaski County, Va.

30. Crayola crayon-maker Emerson Moser retired in 1990 after 37 years with the company, having molded 1.4 billion crayons.

31. Only then was it revealed that he's colorblind.

32. Fewer than one woman in a hundred is colorblind. Among men it's one out of 14.

33. Researchers at Yale University have determined that the scent of crayons is the 18th-most-recognizable smell among American adults.

34. They found that coffee was the most recognized smell, followed by peanut butter and Vicks VapoRub.

35. Researchers at Yale have too much time on their hands.

36. Crayola sold about $42 million worth of crayons in the last year, not including sales at Wal-Mart stores. Its closest competitor sold about $3.7 million.

37. It costs about a penny to make a crayon.

38. The company hardly ever changes the name of a crayon once it's been introduced. That's happened only three times in 100 years.

39. Most of the crayon names don't come from children's suggestions, the rainbow, nature, or even company marketers. They come from a federal Commerce Department manual entitled "Color: Universal Language and Dictionary of Names."

40. Purple Heart is the only crayon named for an American military medal. The award goes to soldiers who are wounded or killed in battle.

41. Cleopatra loved the color purple.

42. So too the artist known as Prince.

43. Crayola executives point out: If all the crayons made in a single year were laid end-to-end along the equator, they would melt.

44. In the early 1900s, American Gothic artist Grant Wood was among several aspiring talents who entered a Crayola-sponsored coloring contest.

45. He won.

46. In 1952, Binney & Smith opened a manufacturing plant in the southern Kansas community of Winfield.

47. Winfield is ranked 56th among the 100 Best Small Towns in America, and hosts an annual music jamboree called the Walnut Valley Festival.

48. Crayola closed its Winfield plant in the late 1990s.

49. The town still has the Walnut Valley Festival.

50. Kids ages 2 to 8 spend an average of 28 minutes a day coloring.

51. Dogs eat more crayons than children do. Or at least it seems that way.

52. People buy enough crayons each year to make a crayon 35 feet in diameter and taller than the Statue of Liberty.

53. The 64-color box of crayons, prized by children for its built-in sharpener, debuted in 1958.

54. What's believed to be the world's largest crayon collection is owned by a retired Navy doctor, William Mahaffey of Sandusky, Ohio. He has more than 725 colors, all cataloged by manufacturer and hue.

55. He has never colored with any of them.

56. Crayola crayons come in boxes of 8, 16, 24, 32, 48, 64, 96 and 120. The 24-crayon box is the best-seller.

57. Ninety-nine percent of Americans recognize the name Crayola.

58. The company also makes Silly Putty.

59. In 1958, Crayola changed the name of Prussian Blue to Midnight Blue. The company says the switch was made at the request of schoolteachers who felt their students had tired of learning Germanic history.

60. We don't believe that for a minute.

61. We think that in the depths of the Cold War, Prussia sounded a bit too uncomfortably like Russia.

62. Silly Putty was invented during World War II by a General Electric researcher named James Wright. He was trying to make a synthetic rubber, because Japanese invasions of the Far East had cut off supplies to the United States.

63. The consumer warning on the back of the modern Silly Putty package says, "Not intended for use as earplugs."

64. Don't use it for chewing gum, either.

65. In 1962, Crayola changed the name of flesh to peach, recognizing that people, like crayons, come in all different colors.

66. In 1969 the company opened a second plant in Easton. It moved its headquarters there from New York City several years later.

67. Boxer Larry Holmes was born and raised in Easton.

68. He still lives there.

69. The town is also home to a Pez Museum.

70. In 1980, Binney & Smith bought an Australia distributorship so it could sell its products Down Under.

71. Kangaroos outnumber people more than 2-1 in Australia.

72. A newborn kangaroo is the size of a honeybee.

73. Beeswax comes from the secretions of worker bees. It's great for making candles, so-so for making crayons.

74. Binney & Smith was bought by Hallmark Cards in 1984.

75. Americans send each other 1.2 billion birthday cards every year.

76. About half a billion are made by Hallmark.

77. People send more cards on Mother's Day than on Father's Day.

78. Crayola added neon carrot to its color lineup in 1990.

79. That same year, eight colors were "retired" and replaced by new shades. The departed crayons were maize, raw umber, lemon yellow, blue gray, orange yellow, orange red, green blue and violet blue.

80. Shortly thereafter a group called RUMPS - the Raw Umber and Maize Preservation Society - held protests outside the corporate offices. So did the Society to Save Lemon Yellow.

81. The next year, Crayola offered those retired crayons for sale as part of a limited-edition collector's tin.

82. Delicious new colors added in 1993 included granny smith apple, asparagus, and macaroni and cheese.

83. More than 8,000 people showed up on opening day at the Crayola Factory in downtown Easton in 1996.

84. The Crayola Factory isn't really a factory.

85. It's a giant play-and-scribble attraction for kids and their parents. Crayola makes its crayons at a plant just outside the city.

86. The Crayola Factory, housed in an old Orr's department store, may be the only place in America where children are encouraged to write on the walls.

87. In 1996, Fred Rogers of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood visited Crayola to officially produce the 100 billionth crayon. The crayon, named blue ribbon, was inserted in a box and sold to the public as part of a contest.

88. Mister Rogers' favorite color was lemon yellow.

89. The special blue ribbon crayon happened to be in a box purchased by Darlene Martin, a grandmother from Port Orchid, Wash.

90. She sold it back to the company for a $100,000 bond.

91. Feathery new crayons added in 1998 included pink flamingo and canary.

92. The total number of colors reached 120 that year.

93. In 1998 the U.S. Postal Service issued a stamp commemorating Crayola crayons.

94. The walking, talking crayon that serves as an animated company spokesman has a name: Tip.

95. Indian red, a staple for four decades, was renamed chestnut in 1999. The company was concerned that people thought the name was supposed to represent the skin tone of American Indians. Actually, the firm says, the name originated from a reddish-brown pigment found near India.

96. In 2000, Silly Putty eggs from the early 1950s went on display at the Smithsonian Institution.

97. We think putting Silly Putty in the Smithsonian is a bit of a stretch.

98. "We are so much more than crayons," says company spokesperson Stacy Gabrielle.

99. Crayola sells stationery, watercolors, drawing pads, gel pens, modeling putty, oil pastels and sidewalk chalk shaped like small bunnies. It sells tints to brighten children's bathwater. It sells scissors, glue, flashcards, play desks and doodle pads, along with disposable cameras, computer mice, cassette players, T-shirts, backpacks, rain hats, beach bags, denim shirts, wristwatches, children's clothes, stuffed animals, bedding, baby goods and eyeglasses.

100. It still makes most of its money selling markers, pencils and crayons.


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I went to college in Easton, and I've advised my chapter there for 2 years, but I have managed to never go to the Crayola Factory. I hope to get there eventually, though!