Yes, I do have a March history post for you, though it’s three days late!
On this day in 1858, an inventor secured a patent for a new invention. It’s one people take for granted now. Everyone has at least a few of these handy things in the house—unless digital means have deposed traditional methods. They’re easily lost, taking up residence under couches, in the back of disorganised drawers, or behind ears.
The inventor was Hymen Lipman, a Jew born in the West Indies in 1817. He emigrated to the United States when he was twenty-one and spent the rest of his life in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
He began to imagine everyday tools in better forms—like envelopes. He became America’s first envelope manufacturer and came up with the idea to add adhesive to the flap for easier sealing.
He discovered a way to bind papers with eyelets twenty years before the invention of the stapler.
And—getting to what concerns us on this day of March—he thought it would be useful if pencils had erasers built into them.
At this point, graphite pencils had been in existence for 400 years, triumphing over their poisoned cousins, which held real lead. The first mass-produced pencils came out in 1662 and pencil industry developed from there.
Like many inventions, though, Lipman’s ‘Lead-Pencil and Eraser’ didn’t immediately gain a place in the business world. Three years later, that changed with the onset of a huge historical event—the American Civil War.
War often causes markets to grow large and grow fast, and entrepreneur Joseph Reckendorfer saw great potential in the new pencils. He bought the patent rights from Lipman for $100,000, which is more than $2,000,000 today.
Unfortunately for Reckendorfer, in 1875 the Supreme Court ruled that the pencil-with-eraser patent was invalid because nothing new had been invented—it was simply a combination of two known inventions. This allowed other companies to use the design without paying any royalties.
Sixty years after Lipman secured his patent, pencils with erasers became popular. In 1915 it inspired one of Silas Conger’s sermons, in which he said, “To keep our past failures ever before us would cause us to continue to fail … take out your pencil, rub out the mark and start over again.”
It reminds me that when we surrender to Jesus, He wipes out our past mistakes and writes a new story in our hearts—a story of truth and triumph in Him. We are His workmanship, or, as another translation says it, His poem. Our sins are erased, and the Author of life doesn’t write mistakes.
Ever.
In Him,
TRQT
Resources:
A simple search of “Hymen Lipman” will bring up many articles about his endeavours. For this article, I drew information from the New York Times, Fox News, and Springfield Museums.
