42 Fun Facts About Crayon

In Crockett Johnson's 1955 picture book, what colour is the crayon a boy named Harold uses to draw his world?

Purple: Harold wants a walk in the moonlight but there is no moon, so he draws one, and later draws a dragon to guard an apple tree and a boat to cross deep water.

In Drew Daywalt's picture book The Day the Crayons Quit, how do Duncan's crayons air their grievances?

They write him letters: some crayons feel overworked and others ignored, while Yellow and Orange are quarrelling over which of them is the true colour of the sun.

Who coined the Crayola brand name?

Alice Binney, wife of Edwin Binney, named the crayons that Binney & Smith began making because schools could not afford artists' crayons.

Which greeting-card company bought Binney & Smith, the maker of Crayola crayons, in 1984?

Hallmark Cards bought Binney & Smith in 1984, and in 2007 the crayon maker dropped its old name to call itself Crayola, after its best-known brand.

At Pemberley in Pride and Prejudice, whose drawings in crayons does Elizabeth Bennet find more interesting than the paintings?

Miss Darcy's drawings in crayons caught Elizabeth's eye because she knew nothing of art, and their subjects were more interesting and more intelligible to her.

Members of which branch of the US armed forces are jokingly known as crayon eaters?

Marines: they took up the insult themselves, the Corps joked along in a video for National Crayon Day, and more than one veteran now sells edible crayons.

At the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, Binney & Smith won a gold medal for inventing what?

Dustless white chalk, sold as An-Du-Septic, cleared the dust from classrooms, and those school sales led Binney & Smith to make affordable Crayola crayons.

How were Edwin Binney and C. Harold Smith related?

Cousins: Joseph Binney brought his son Edwin and nephew C. Harold Smith into his firm, and when he retired in 1885 the cousins formed Binney & Smith.

Which feature debuted with Crayola's first 64-crayon box in the late 1950s?

A built-in sharpener was the selling point of the 64 box, which Crayola first announced to children on the Captain Kangaroo television show.

Which printing process begins with an artist drawing on a slab of limestone with a wax crayon?

Lithography was invented in the 1790s by Alois Senefelder, a struggling playwright who could not afford to have his plays engraved and wanted a cheap way to print them himself.

Which name replaced 'Flesh' on a Crayola crayon in 1962?

Peach took over from Flesh in 1962, when Crayola changed the crayon's name partly as a result of the U.S. civil rights movement.

In 1949 the Paris colour maker Sennelier created professional oil pastels for which painter?

Pablo Picasso wanted a colour stick he could use freely on almost any surface, so Henri Sennelier developed a waxy oil pastel for him.

Which of these was among the eight colours Crayola retired into its 'Crayola Hall of Fame' in 1990?

Maize: losing it moved fans to form a protest group called RUMPs, the Raw Umber and Maize Preservation Society, which campaigned against the change.

Which name did an online vote give the blue Crayola crayon that replaced Dandelion in 2017?

Bluetiful: the shade copies a newly discovered pigment whose chemical name Crayola thought too awkward for children, so it asked fans to choose a friendlier one.

YInMn Blue, the pigment behind a 2017 Crayola crayon, is named from the chemical symbols of yttrium, indium and which element?

Manganese: a student heating manganese oxide in search of new electronics materials pulled a brilliant blue compound out of the furnace instead.

Cray-Pas, the first oil pastel crayons, were sold in 1920s Japan in which two versions?

Summer and winter: the early sticks were so sensitive to heat that a hard recipe with little oil was sold for the hot months and a softer, oilier one for the cold.

Which of these was one of the 16 fan-named colours added to Crayola's 96 Big Box in 1993?

Macaroni and Cheese was named by a six-year-old girl, who wrote to Crayola's contest herself and picked the name because it was her favourite food.

Which children's TV host moulded Crayola's 100 billionth crayon in 1996?

Fred Rogers poured the wax for it, and the crayon then became a contest prize that Crayola paid its winner $100,000 to get back.

After fans protested the 1990 retirement of eight Crayola colours, what did Crayola do?

Reissued them in a limited set: Crayola had dropped the eight because children wanted brighter shades, so the old colours returned only briefly, in a commemorative tin.

Crayola's 'Multicultural Crayons' and 'Colors of the World' packs represent what?

Skin tones: Crayola developed the 2020 shades with makeup chemist Victor Casale, who recalled mixing pink and dark brown crayons as a boy to try to match his own.

Why did Crayola change some of its 1994 Magic Scent crayons the following year?

Parents said they smelled edible: Crayola scrapped every food scent and brought out smells no child would want to taste instead, among them lumber and campfire smoke.

Crayola's eight 1972 specialty crayons, with names like Ultra Pink, were designed to do what?

Glow under black light: their fluorescent pigments soak up the lamp's invisible ultraviolet rays and give the energy back as visible colour.

Which stretchy toy did Binney & Smith, the maker of Crayola crayons, buy the rights to in 1977?

Silly Putty was found during World War II research into a rubber substitute; it failed at that job but became a hit toy sold in plastic eggs.

In The Simpsons episode HOMR, why does Homer have a crayon put back into his brain?

Being smart made him an outcast: his safety report shut the power plant, and the friends it put out of work burned an effigy of him, so Moe pushed a crayon back in.

Crayola launched its first markers to coincide with which company milestone?

The crayon's 75th anniversary was marked with markers, and the 90th with a 96-crayon box whose sixteen new colours the public was invited to name.

In 2002 the National Toy Hall of Fame, which inducted Crayola crayons in 1998, moved to which US city?

Rochester, New York: the hall began at a children's museum in Salem, Oregon, which ran out of room for it and sold it to The Strong museum.

The Crayola Experience, originally the Crayola Factory, is in which Pennsylvania town?

Easton: the attraction first opened as the Crayola Factory yet never made crayons for sale, a downtown stand-in built because so many people wanted to tour the real plant.

In the 1920s, Binney & Smith bought which company's crayon line, bringing the colour wheel into Crayola?

Munsell: Binney & Smith kept the respected name alive for years, selling the crayons as Munsell-Crayola before folding the colours into its own boxes.

Modern children's crayons are made mostly from which material?

Paraffin wax crayons began as black waterproof markers sold to factories, and Binney & Smith made one of those before it added colour for the classroom.

Which Roman scholar is thought to have described the first wax crayon drawing techniques?

Pliny the Elder's Natural History describes encaustic painting, in which pigment is bound in hot beeswax and 'burned in', the technique crayon histories cite as the earliest wax drawing method.

The French word 'crayon' originally meant what?

Chalk pencil: English kept the word for coloured drawing sticks, but French moved on, and a crayon in Paris today is an ordinary lead pencil.

The drawing believed to be the world's oldest, made with an ochre crayon about 73,000 years ago, was found in which country?

South Africa: the red cross-hatched lines, found in Blombos Cave, stop so abruptly at the edges of the stone flake that researchers think the pattern once covered a larger surface.

Binney & Smith chemist Colin Snedeker was awarded a patent in 1990 for inventing what?

Colin Snedeker's patent was for washable crayons, whose marks wash off walls and clothes; Crayola put them on sale in 1991.

Which American author published his Sketch Book in 1819 under the pen name Geoffrey Crayon?

Washington Irving signed The Sketch Book as Geoffrey Crayon, and his other alias, Diedrich Knickerbocker, became a byword for New Yorkers and gave knickerbocker trousers their name.

Sheep farmers strap a harness holding a coloured marking crayon to which animal?

The ram: the crayon on his chest marks each ewe he mates, and farmers switch colours through the season, so a ewe's mark shows roughly when she was bred and when to expect her lambs.

Heelball, a black wax crayon shoemakers used on heels and soles, became the classic tool for which hobby?

Brass rubbing: paper laid over a medieval church brass is rubbed with black heelball, so the metal surface turns black while the engraved lines stay white.

What does the AP seal from the Art & Creative Materials Institute certify about a box of crayons?

Non-toxic: before a product may carry the seal, its maker has to hand the full formula to the institute, where a toxicologist reviews what goes into it.

Which marking tool is also known as a chinagraph or a china marker?

Grease pencil: many are cased in paper instead of wood, so rather than sharpening one you peel away a strip of the casing to expose more wax.

Nicolas-Jacques Conté, inventor of the Conté crayon, mixed graphite with clay because war cut France off from which country's graphite?

Britain: with English graphite blocked, Conté pressed powdered graphite and clay into sticks, a recipe so successful that pencil leads are still made this way.

In 2000, lab tests commissioned by a Seattle newspaper found what in three major brands of crayons?

Asbestos, likely from talc used as a binder: federal regulators called the risk extremely low, yet asked makers to reformulate, and Crayola, Prang and Rose Art agreed.

Infrared scans showed the painter himself wrote 'could only have been painted by a madman' on which 1893 crayon-and-tempera work?

The Scream: the pencil note was long blamed on an offended visitor, until infrared images made the faint writing legible and experts matched it to Edvard Munch's own hand.

Crayola crayons appeared on a 32-cent US stamp in which commemorative series?

Crayola crayons featured on a 32-cent stamp in the Celebrate the Century series, on the 1900s-decade sheet alongside the Wright brothers' flight and Theodore Roosevelt.