Natural rubbers make the best erasers, because their innate abrasive qualities help them remove material from paper with aplomb, Advincula said. The erasers we see in stores are almost always some proprietary combination of all three. A host of additives, like additional particles and aromatic agents, can tweak the mixture further, as can the compounding process. Thermoplastics, a type of polymer that can be hardened or softened depending on heat, are easier to shape. Natural rubbers-made from the stuff that comes from rubber trees-have good erasing properties. Rigoberto Advincula, a professor at Case Western Reserve University who has consulted in the pencil and eraser industry, said that erasers are usually made of some combination of rubber and plastic components. Precise breakdowns of materials tend to be guarded as company secrets. Since then, as material engineering has improved, erasers have become more high-tech.īut even among eraserheads, the exact composition of today’s erasers is a bit of a mystery. Nairne used rubber from trees, and his magical device was so impressive that the theologan Joseph Priestley mentioned it in a footnote in his book A Familiar Introduction to the Theory and Practice of Perspective : "I have seen a substance excellently adapted to the purpose of wiping from paper the mark of black-lead-pencil,” he wrote. A lot of them are just kind of a plain cheapish rubber.”Įrasers were invented in 1770 by an engineer named Edward Nairne. According to Andy Welfle, who runs a wooden pencil blog called Woodclinched and co-hosts the Erasable podcast on the same topic (and has lately been partial to a Czechoslovakian eraser ), “pencils that you can just buy at Office Depot, or Staples, or Walmart, something like that, a lot of them do have really terrible erasers. The meme “ you had one job! ” seems apt here, until you consider that most examples in the “you had one job!” genre-billboards put up incorrectly, railings slanting in the wrong direction-are onetime mistakes rather than systemic failures. In fact, it makes it worse-smearing black graphene all over and perhaps even ripping the page.Īs another year of school supply shopping season has come and gone, it’s time to finally ask ourselves the question at the center of the aforementioned, all-too-common scenario: Why are most erasers awful at erasing?įinding a pencil with an honest-to-goodness, functioning eraser is much harder than it should be, and even separate erasers sold on their own often do a middling job. Only when you flip over your pencil and rub, the eraser doesn’t do its job. No matter, because on the other end of your writing implement sits its perfect counterbalance, that predecessor to the delete key: the eraser. Maybe after all these years you’re still mixing up b’s and d’s. You’re using pencil, fast and furious, to scribble notes when you make a mistake.
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