Dixon Toconderoga Eraser Sourcing

Erasers which are primarily composed either synthetic or natural began their inventive journey in the nineteenth century. The discovery and introduction of rubber as a miracle material in the 1820’s lead to a boom in the Brazilian natural rubber tree harvesting industry. Much of this was spurred by the building of rubber manufacturing plants in developed economies. Businesses opened and created products made of rubber that were shipped to consumers in the United States and Europe. However, within five years most rubber manufacturers quickly went out of business due to the instability of natural rubber at varying temperatures. Rubber was originally a gum like substance that would turn rock hard and brittle in the cold, and melt into a sticky gum like substance in the heat. This made any product made of the substance worthless since it would be destroyed by varying temperatures soon after its production.

The destruction of the “rubber fever” boom of the early 1830’s prompted American Charles Goodyear to experiment and eventually create a process to turn the gum like sticky substance of natural rubber into a weather resistant plastic that would hold its form in varying temperatures. The process he developed is known as vulcanization and involves adding sulfur and heat to natural rubber to form a cross-linked polymer that is a durable material. Soon after this transformational discovery natural rubber was used to make thousands of consumer and industrial products worldwide.

During most of the nineteenth century rubber erasers and wooden pencils were separate components. It was not until 1858, when Hyman Lipman of Philadelphia patented a rubber plug connected by glue to a wooden pencil. Soon after the patent was contested in the United States Supreme Court which deemed it could not be patented since the functionality of these two components were not changed by them being connected. This ruling led to other companies replicating erasers glued to their wooden...