The Crayon Man: The True Story of the Invention of
Crayola Crayons. By Natascha Biebow. Illustrated by Steven Salerno. Houghton Mifflin
Harcourt. $17.99.
There are many things we take for granted
in life, whether we are adults or children, never pausing to wonder where they
came from and how they came to be. Crayons, a ubiquitous part of childhood
going back generations, are one example. They seem always to have been around,
and not to have changed very much – except for the addition of some new colors,
larger boxes, and of course higher prices – since parents’ childhoods and their parents’ childhoods and…well, how
far back do they actually go?
This is a too-infrequently-asked question,
because it turns out, as Natascha Biebow explains in The Crayon Man, that the super-familiar Crayola crayons (and why,
exactly, are they called that?) date to an age almost unimaginably remote from
the present day, even though it is historically not all that long ago: the year
1903. This was a time when paper could not be used in schools: it was too
expensive, so kids wrote with dusty, crumbly chalk on small slates. It was a
time when crayons, although they existed, were impractical: big, clumsy, and hard
to use. It was a time when only high-quality artists’ crayons could be employed
in anything approaching the manner we take for granted now – but they cost a
great deal and did not last, tending to crumble and break easily.
This is hard to imagine, but Biebow walks
children (and parents!) through the realities of the late 19th and early
20th century surely and carefully, and the fine period-style
illustrations by Steven Salerno help keep the story lively and, in the main,
accurate. The book is the story of Edwin Binney (1866-1934), half of the Binney
& Smith team whose eponymous company (which used that name from 1885 until
2007, thereafter becoming known as Crayola) started out creating industrial
pigments that were so impressive for quality and price that they won a gold
medal at the 1900 Paris Exposition. Binney was something of what we would now
call a serial entrepreneur, inventing a better pencil, better chalk and other
items before turning his attention to crayons, largely at the behest of his
wife, a former schoolteacher.
Binney’s great idea – well, one of them –
involved using wax in crayons. He had employed it in other products and
thought, correctly as it turned out, that wax might solve the problem of easy
breaking that afflicted crayons made in Europe from charcoal and oil. The Crayon Man does not make it seem
that the invention of Crayola crayons was quick or easy: there are many scenes
of ways in which Binney and his coworkers “kept on trying” and “kept on
experimenting.” There is a certain among of revisionist history here, in the
pictures if not the text: Salerno shows not only women but also
African-American women working as equals with men, a historical inaccuracy
justified by today’s determination to rewrite history to make it more inclusive
(and also by the desire to have The
Crayon Man reach out to a wide audience of 21st-century
readers). There are multiple pictures showing workers, including Binney,
covered in all sorts of colors, and some of these illustrations are highlights
of the book, making it exceptionally, well, colorful – even if the extent of
spillage onto workers’ clothing seems somewhat overdone.
The creation of Crayola crayons was, in
effect, a major science project, with Binney as the lead creator – his cousin,
C. Harold Smith, meanwhile kept Binney & Smith going with its more-mundane
products: Smith was an outgoing and by all accounts highly effective salesman.
It was in June 1903 that Binney got the recipe for a new kind of colored crayon
right – and, writes Biebow, his wife, Alice, promptly named the product: “craie,” French for a stick of chalk,
plus “ola” as in oleagninous, which is to say oily rather than dry and crumbly. Put
the words together with a little bit of creative, Americanized spelling, and
there you have it: Crayola crayons. The crayons, originally sold in boxes of
eight colors for a nickel, were an immediate hit, assisted by the fact that by
the time they were invented, new methods of creating paper had also been found
– making paper cheap enough for children to use for coloring. Crayola crayons
would not have worked on the old slates for which chalk was required, and would
not have been quickly adopted if they had required they use of highly expensive
paper.
Shortly after Crayola crayons came into
being, Binney & Smith won another important gold medal, at the 1904 St.
Louis World’s Fair. It was not for the crayons but for the company’s dustless
chalk – but the fact that the company was a gold-medal winner quickly appeared
on Crayola crayon boxes, lending the new child-focused invention an extra bit
of cachet. This is an altogether delightful story, neatly told and filled with
fascinating tidbits of information – and after the main narrative ends, there
is wonderful two-page photographic presentation showing how Crayola crayons are
now made. It is as amazing in terms
of the use of modern technology as the main story is in terms of the creativity
and business acumen of Edwin Binney. Binney and his inventiveness came along at
the right time, when industrial processes made colored wax crayons possible at
reasonable prices and when paper could be produced cheaply enough to make the
crayons readily usable. The Crayon Man
is a wonderful blend of biography and scientific/commercial history, and a fine
testament to the spirit of creativity that seems to be a longstanding trait of
Americans and their businesses.
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