About Vintage Crayola School Crayons
Who can forget her first new pack of crayons? When you opened the distinctive green and yellow box the smell is the first thing you noticed. Then you found eight individually paper-wrapped crayons in all the basic colors-blue, black, green, red, yellow, orange, violet and brown. First produced in 1903, Crayola brand school crayons have changed little since our parents, grandparents and even great grandparents colored with them in school.
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Binney and Smith Company
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Binney and Smith began as an industrial pigment company in 1864, selling products that made the rubber for tires black and the paint for barns red. Expanding to the manufacture slate pencils, this led to the creation of other school products. According to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Inventor Archive the company won a Gold Medal at "the St. Louis World Exhibition in 1902 for their new product for teachers: the first dustless chalk."
Crayons
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According to MIT, wax crayons were 'big, dull and clumsy' at the turn of the 20th century and used mainly in industry. As Binney and Smith salesman took their school products to teachers across the country, the need for better school crayons became apparent. While artists had access to color-saturated crayons, they were too expensive for school children. The original Crayola School Crayon eight-pack appeared in 1903. Selling for one nickel, it contained the same eight colors it does today.
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The Name Crayola
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A former school teacher, Alice Binney, wife of company founder Edwin Binney, took great interest in this new product, according to the Binney and Smith Media Center on the company's website. The name 'Crayola' was her idea. Combining "craie," the French word for chalk and "ola," short for oleaginous, which means oily--Crayola stands for "oily chalk.' Her inspiration came from the paraffin wax used to make crayons.
Size and Shape
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Vintage Crayola School Crayons range in size from 2.5-inches to 4 inches long according to the website CrayonCollecting.com. In 1908 for example, Binney and Smith Crayola School Crayons came in package sizes ranging from eight crayons to 14 crayons. Vintage school crayons were either round or hexagon-shaped, like a pencil. Not all of the vintage crayons had paper wrapping but all of them did have the sharpened tip we are familiar with today.
Colors
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According to the Binney and Smith Crayola website, the original eight-pack of crayons seems to grow overnight to the 48-color crayon box in 1949. Crayon collectors like John Astolfi, who created the "Lost Color List" of vintage Crayola School Crayons, says this isn't entirely accurate--crayon colors were gradually added over the years, until reaching 48 colors in 1949 and then to 64 colors in 1958. Over that time the crayon's names and colors changed, according to Astolfi, based on existing vintage Crayola school crayons whose names and colors don't match the current official Crayola list.
According to Binney and Smith only three colors have ever changed names--Prussian blue became midnight blue in1958, flesh was renamed peach in 1958, and as of 1999, Indian red is now chestnut. The company also retired eight 'traditional' colors in 1990, including maize and raw umber.
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References
Resources
- Photo Credit crayons image by Rich Johnson from Fotolia.com
