Crayon Trivia
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42 free crayon trivia questions with answers. Almost everyone has held a Crayola crayon, and almost nobody knows who named it, why 'Flesh' became 'Peach' or which colour America voted its favourite in 2000. This crayon trivia covers the whole box: Edwin and Alice Binney, the 1903 launch, the dustless-chalk gold medal that ended up on every box, the Munsell colour wheel, the 1957 64-pack with its sharpener, the retirements of 1990 and 2003, Dandelion's farewell and Bluetiful's arrival, Silly Putty, the Crayola Experience and the 1,500-pound blue crayon. There are questions on crayons before Crayola too: Pliny the Elder and encaustic wax, the French chalk pencil, Jane Austen's 1813 mention, and the Massachusetts stationer who rolled leather-marking wax into sticks. Easy ones any kid can get; hard ones for people who remember what Indian Red was renamed. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries on Crayola, the crayon and its colours, and each question shows the sentence that backs it up. Good for a classroom, a craft party or a rainy-day family quiz.
30 of 42 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In Crockett Johnson's 1955 picture book, what colour is the crayon a boy named Harold uses to draw his world?
Purple
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.
Q 02In Drew Daywalt's picture book The Day the Crayons Quit, how do Duncan's crayons air their grievances?
They write him letters
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.
Q 03Who coined the Crayola brand name?
Alice Binney
Alice Binney, wife of Edwin Binney, named the crayons that Binney & Smith began making because schools could not afford artists' crayons.
Q 04Which greeting-card company bought Binney & Smith, the maker of Crayola crayons, in 1984?
Hallmark Cards
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.
Q 05At Pemberley in Pride and Prejudice, whose drawings in crayons does Elizabeth Bennet find more interesting than the paintings?
Miss Darcy
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.
Q 06Members of which branch of the US armed forces are jokingly known as crayon eaters?
Marines
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.
Q 07At the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, Binney & Smith won a gold medal for inventing what?
Dustless white chalk
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.
Q 08How were Edwin Binney and C. Harold Smith related?
Cousins
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.
Q 09Which feature debuted with Crayola's first 64-crayon box in the late 1950s?
A built-in sharpener
A built-in sharpener was the selling point of the 64 box, which Crayola first announced to children on the Captain Kangaroo television show.
Q 10Which printing process begins with an artist drawing on a slab of limestone with a wax crayon?
Lithography
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.
Q 11Which name replaced 'Flesh' on a Crayola crayon in 1962?
Peach
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.
Q 12In 1949 the Paris colour maker Sennelier created professional oil pastels for which painter?
Pablo Picasso
Pablo Picasso wanted a colour stick he could use freely on almost any surface, so Henri Sennelier developed a waxy oil pastel for him.
Q 13Which of these was among the eight colours Crayola retired into its 'Crayola Hall of Fame' in 1990?
Maize
Maize: losing it moved fans to form a protest group called RUMPs, the Raw Umber and Maize Preservation Society, which campaigned against the change.
Q 21Why did Crayola change some of its 1994 Magic Scent crayons the following year?
Parents said they smelled edible
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.
Q 22Crayola's eight 1972 specialty crayons, with names like Ultra Pink, were designed to do what?
Glow under black light
Glow under black light: their fluorescent pigments soak up the lamp's invisible ultraviolet rays and give the energy back as visible colour.
Q 23Which stretchy toy did Binney & Smith, the maker of Crayola crayons, buy the rights to in 1977?
Q 14Which name did an online vote give the blue Crayola crayon that replaced Dandelion in 2017?
Bluetiful
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.
Q 15YInMn Blue, the pigment behind a 2017 Crayola crayon, is named from the chemical symbols of yttrium, indium and which element?
Manganese
Manganese: a student heating manganese oxide in search of new electronics materials pulled a brilliant blue compound out of the furnace instead.
Q 16Cray-Pas, the first oil pastel crayons, were sold in 1920s Japan in which two versions?
Summer and winter
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.
Q 17Which of these was one of the 16 fan-named colours added to Crayola's 96 Big Box in 1993?
Macaroni and Cheese
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.
Q 18Which children's TV host moulded Crayola's 100 billionth crayon in 1996?
Fred Rogers
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.
Q 19After fans protested the 1990 retirement of eight Crayola colours, what did Crayola do?
Reissued them in a limited set
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.
Q 20Crayola's 'Multicultural Crayons' and 'Colors of the World' packs represent what?
Skin tones
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.
Silly Putty
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.
Q 24In The Simpsons episode HOMR, why does Homer have a crayon put back into his brain?
Being smart made him an outcast
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.
Q 25Crayola launched its first markers to coincide with which company milestone?
The crayon's 75th anniversary
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.
Q 26In 2002 the National Toy Hall of Fame, which inducted Crayola crayons in 1998, moved to which US city?
Rochester, New York
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.
Q 27The Crayola Experience, originally the Crayola Factory, is in which Pennsylvania town?
Easton
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.
Q 28In the 1920s, Binney & Smith bought which company's crayon line, bringing the colour wheel into Crayola?
Munsell
Munsell: Binney & Smith kept the respected name alive for years, selling the crayons as Munsell-Crayola before folding the colours into its own boxes.
Q 29Modern children's crayons are made mostly from which material?
Paraffin wax
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.
Q 30Which Roman scholar is thought to have described the first wax crayon drawing techniques?
Pliny the Elder
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.