Lifestyle
Meet the American who invented sliced bread: Otto Rohwedder, hard-luck hawkeye
Otto Rohwedder gave the world an innovation by which all others are compared.
Rohwedder, a native of Davenport, Iowa, invented sliced bread.
It’s the greatest thing since … Well, it’s the greatest thing, according to popular acclaim.
“Sliced bread is the standard of all innovation, past, present and future,” said Ed Douglas, a businessman, local historian and county commissioner from Chillicothe, Missouri.
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The world’s first loaves of bread — sliced and packaged right out of the oven by Rohwedder’s unique innovation — rolled out of Chillicothe Baking Co. in 1928.
Sliced bread changed American consumer culture and household habits with shocking speed.
Otto Frederick Rohwedder (1880-1960), American inventor of the first automatic bread-slicing machine.
(Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo)
Douglas, nicknamed “Sliced Bread Ed,” has helped lead recent efforts by his community to declare itself the “Home of Sliced Bread” — and champion the memory of Rohwedder.
All corners of the world
Humans began baking bread long before recorded history. It is enjoyed in myriad forms by all cultures in all corners of the world.
Bread literally fueled the rise of civilization.
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“For 15,000 years the epic of grain has been one with the epic of man,” author Heinrich E. Jacob wrote in his celebrated 1944 tome, “Six Thousand Years of Bread: Its Holy and Unholy History.”
Yet it took a hard-luck hawkeye to challenge all known history and write a better version of the “epic of man.”
“Sliced bread is the standard of all innovation, past, present and future.” — “Sliced Bread” Ed Douglas of Chillicothe, Missouri
Rohwedder had no background as a baker, engineer or inventor.
But he had a preposterous dream to make bread better, even as the baking industry belittled his vision.
“Like any paradigm-changing invention, people could not conceive of sliced bread at the time,” bread industry executive Allen Wright said in the inventor’s American Society of Baking Hall of Fame biography.
Chilicothe Baking Co. in Chillicothe, Missouri, introduced sliced bread on July 7, 1928. The “Home of Sliced Bread” honors its legacy with a giant mural today.
(Charity Trotter, Clicks By Charity Photography)
Rohwedder outwitted 10,000 years of bread-making tradition — which is why sliced bread has entered the cultural lexicon as the ultimate superlative of innovation.
Television, said comedian Red Skelton in 1951, “is the greatest invention since sliced bread.”
The comparison by the celebrated entertainer stuck.
“For 15,000 years the epic of grain has been one with the epic of man.” — Author Heinrich E. Jacob
Sliced bread is so mundane today we assume it’s as old as fire or the wheel.
We forget it’s a recent invention in the annals of mankind. We certainly forgot the man who invented it.
‘The epic story of man’
Otto Frederick Rohwedder was born in Des Moines, Iowa, on July 7, 1880. His family made its way to Davenport at some point when he was a small child.
His father, Claus, was born in Kreis Dithmarschen, Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, in 1845. He arrived in Iowa in 1866 and worked as a stone mason contractor. He “designed the stone work on many of Davenport’s prominent business buildings of former years,” according to a 1922 obituary.
Chilicothe Baking Co. in Chillicothe, Missouri, where sliced bread was introduced on July 7, 1928.
(Charity Trotter, Clicks By Charity Photography)
Rohwedder’s mother, Elizabeth Margaretha Margaret (Jannssen), known as Margaret, was also born in Schleswig-Holstein and arrived in Iowa in 1868.
She and Claus wed the following year. They had four sons, including Otto, and one daughter.
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Rohwedder graduated from the Illinois College of Optometry in 1900 with a degree in optics. He ended up in the jewelry business, reportedly apprenticing in the trade as a teenager.
He operated three jewelry shops in St. Joseph, Missouri. The business struggled, by many accounts.
“Television is the greatest invention since sliced bread.” — Red Skelton in 1951
Nobody knows how or why, but at some point in his 30s, Rohwedder conceived the idea of devising a way to slice bread at a commercial level. He returned to his hometown of Davenport in 1916 and used the funds from the sale of his jewelry business to pursue his dream.
It was a disaster.
“He spent all his time raising money, building a factory and working on his designs,” said “Sliced Bread” Ed.
Rohwedder’s mission to rewrite the epic story of man and bread appeared to end when fire destroyed his factory in nearby Monmouth, Illinois, in November 1917 — and with it his prototype bread slicer and the blueprints for it.
Otto Rohwedder sold his first commercial bread-slicing machine in July 1928 and filed the patent in November. He had begun working on the project more than a decade earlier.
(US Patent and Trademark Office)
Rohwedder suffered one other setback, according to Douglas. He suffered a respiratory illness that doctors said might be fatal.
“They told him to give it up and get his affairs in order,” Douglas said.
He ignored the advice. Instead, he went back to the drawing board, recreating his invention and soliciting the financing to produce it.
Bread was historically baked at home or bought by whole loaf and cut at home. Household utensils are shown in 1906 — bread slicer, coffee roaster, Bissell carpet sweeper, mangle, knife sharpener, spice box — from “Mrs. Beeton’s Household Management.” The book, first published in 1861, was an outstanding popular success, selling 61,000 copies in its first year.
(Ann Ronan Pictures/Print Collector/Getty Images)
His health improved. And so did his inventive fortune.
Finally, by 1928, he had a prototype — a machine that could slice and package bread right out of the oven.
It proved harder to convince people of sliced bread’s potential.
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The baking industry cast off Rohwedder as a crackpot, as preposterous as this seems in hindsight.
People baked their own bread at home or bought it by the loaf and cut it at home. The system worked well for thousands of years.
A drawing of Otto Rohwedder’s innovative commercial bread slicer, which reinvented the bread business in 1928.
(Courtesy Visit Chillicothe)
Nobody but Rohwedder thought there was a better way to sell bread.
“Few people in the industry believed that bread could be automatically sliced as it came off the assembly line,” Aaron Bobrow-Strain wrote in his 2012 book, “White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf.”
“Bread was too unruly … Most bakers actively opposed factory slicing.”
Rohwedder “found no takers for the idea and had almost given up hope,” the author added.
Instant sensation
Yet Rohwedder finally found someone willing — perhaps equally desperate — to take a chance on his scheme to reinvent the staff of life.
His name was Frank Bench. He ran the struggling Chillicothe Baking Co. — and he was looking for a Hail Mary.
Frank Bench ran the struggling Chillicothe Baking Co. in Missouri when he installed Otto Rohwedder’s commercial bread slicer in 1928. It produced the first packaged sliced bread in history on July 7, 1928 — and proved an instant sensation.
(Visit Chillicothe)
He ordered one of Rohwedder’s slicing machines on July 1, 1928, and touted the news in the local Constitution-Tribune on July 6.
“The idea of sliced bread may be startling to some people,” the story read, attempting to reassure customers who were surely shocked by the concept.
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“The Chillicothe Baking Company has installed a new multi-bladed bread slicer, which performs a feat which heretofore had been considered by bakers as being impossible — namely the slicing of fresh loaves.”
Sliced Kleen Maid Bread, the first loaves of pre-sliced bread in human history, rolled out of Chillicothe Baking Co. a day later, on July 7, 1928 — which just happened to be Rohwedder’s 48th birthday.
The bakery claimed “the distinction of being the first bakers in the world to sell sliced bread to the public.”
Otto Rohwedder sold his first bread-slicing machine to Chillicothe Baking Co. of Missouri, which introduced sliced bread on July 7, 1928. After its stunning success, company records show sales quickly followed in the Midwest and then farther across the nation in 1928 and 1929.
(Courtesy Visit Chillicothe)
It was an instant sensation.
“Sales at the bakery shot up 1,000% in two weeks,” Chillicothe tourism director Amy Supple told Fox News Digital.
Word quickly spread throughout the industry. Rohwedder’s records show orders for his machine began to flow in from across the Midwest.
By early 1929, he was selling slicing machines to bakeries and other businesses as far away as New York and Florida.
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The impact of sliced bread on the American household is evident by public reaction in 1943, at the depths of World War II, when the government announced it would begin rationing sliced bread.
The Roosevelt administration had already rationed sugar, meat and coffee.
But sliced bread proved too much to handle. The news incited a vocal rebellion among American homemakers.
A line at a New Orleans, Louisiana, rationing board. March 1943. American homemakers revolted in 1943 when the government began to ration sliced bread. Just 15 years earlier, sliced bread hadn’t existed.
(Photo by © CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)
“I should like to let you know how important sliced bread is to the morale and saneness of a household,” distraught mother Sue Forrester of Fairfield, Connecticut, claiming to speak on behalf of America’s housewives, lamented in a New York Times letter to the editor.
In 1928, the man who imagined sliced bread was treated as a crackpot. Fifteen years later, his invention was a necessity that people couldn’t live without, even in wartime.
Writes Bobrow-Strain, “Otto Rohwedder, unappreciated and down on his luck, had achieved something nearly every member of the industrial baking establishment thought impossible.”
A community rediscovers its legacy
Otto Frederick Rohwedder died on Nov. 8, 1960 in Concord, Michigan. He was 80 years old.
He’s buried beside his wife, Carrie, beneath a humble headstone in Albion, Michigan.
Otto Rohwedder invented sliced bread in Missouri in 1928. He died in Albion, Michigan, in 1960 at age 80.
(Photo by Kate Keller)
He sold the invention by which all others are judged to Micro-Westco of Bettendorf, Iowa, in 1933, during the depths of the Great Depression, according to the American Society of Baking.
He worked for the company for the rest of his professional life as sales manager of its Rohwedder Bakery Machine Division — a sort of Johnny Appleseed of sliced-bread making. He retired in 1951.
The world continues to marvel at Rohwedder’s achievement. The phrase “the greatest thing since sliced bread” has become deeply ingrained in our language.
But it largely forgot the man.
“This is a very family-oriented community,” Chillicothe Mayor Theresa Kelly told Fox News Digital. “We’re very proud to be the home of sliced bread.”
“You know 1928 was just prior of the Great Depression and World War II. It was that Greatest Generation,” said Supple. “And they were really great but humble people.”
Chillicothe, Missouri, has recently rediscovered its history as the birthplace of the invention by which all others are compared. The community houses its visitors’ bureau in the former bakery where sliced bread was born.
A large new mural touting it as the “Home of Sliced Bread” has quickly become the city’s most recognizable landmark and most popular Instagram attraction.
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“This is a very family-oriented community,” Chillicothe Mayor Theresa Kelly told Fox News Digital. “We’re very proud to be the home of sliced bread.”
The state assembly declared July 7 to be Sliced Bread Day in Missouri in 2018.
The 2023 Sliced Bread Day Festival in Chillicothe is scheduled this year for Saturday, July 8. The community hopes that Rohwedder will be rediscovered and earn his place among the great inventors in human history.
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Perhaps it’s asking too much. Bread, and now sliced bread, is so ingrained in human existence, we instinctively assume it’s always been there, like the oceans or the stars. Surely something so essential to life could not be invented by man.
“History celebrates the battlefield whereon we meet our death, but scorns to speak of the plowed fields whereby we thrive,” influential 19th-centuryFrench naturalist Jean-Henry Fabre wrote philosophically of bread.
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“It knows the names of kings’ bastards but cannot tell us the origin of wheat. That is the way of human folly.”
To read more stories in this unique “Meet the American Who…” series from Fox News Digital, click here.
Source: https://www.foxnews.com/lifestyle/meet-american-invented-sliced-bread-otto-rohwedder-hawkeye
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April Fools’ Day quiz! Test your knowledge in this fun quiz about the annual day
Lifestyle
Meet the American who is the ‘true father of baseball,’ New York City physician Daniel ‘Doc’ Adams
Daniel “Doc” Adams nurtured baseball in its formative years of the mid-1800s as if it were his only child.
He laid down the laws of baseball in its infancy, guiding the sport the rest of its days.
He taught important life skills to the game, from playing shortstop to umpiring — all essential to its growth.
He provided for baseball when it was needy, making the earliest bats and balls so that others could enjoy the game he loved as his own.
“Doc Adams is the true father of baseball,” John Thorn, the official historian of Major League Baseball, told Fox News Digital.
Thorn first made that claim in a 1992 article for Elysian Fields Quarterly, a journal of baseball scholarship. He has repeated the statement many times since.
Daniel “Doc” Adams, a native of New Hampshire and a Harvard-trained physician, played a critical role in the development of baseball in the 1840s and 1850s. His incredible contributions were either lost to history or credited to others. Baseball historians and enthusiasts are working to recognize Adams and get him enshrined in the National Baseball Hall of Fame. (Public Domain)
Adams was dubbed the “father of baseball” in the press as early as 1895. Yet when he died in 1899, his legacy as the essential figure in the foundation of the National Pastime died with him.
The vacuum in public perception of baseball lore was filled by other figures — less consequential figures, according to the experts today.
“Doc Adams is the true father of baseball.” — John Thorn, official historian of Major League Baseball
The popular origin story of baseball is that it was invented by Abner Doubleday, later a Civil War hero, in Cooperstown, New York, in 1839; and that Alexander Cartwright, Adams’ teammate with the Knickerbockers Base Ball Club of Manhattan, codified the game while playing baseball at Elysian Fields in Hoboken, New Jersey.
But a roar of protest has risen from the grandstand of Baseball America in recent years.
Historians and enthusiasts hope to set the record straight in a sport that cherishes tradition more than any other but has had its own origin story wrong for many years.
The New York Knickerbockers Base Ball Club, an important pioneer in the early days of baseball. Doc Adams, the “true father of baseball,” is in the front row, second from left. (Public Domain)
They want Doc Adams given his due by baseball officials and the American public as the most formative figure in the early days of baseball.
And they want him given a long overdue place of honor in the National Baseball Hall of Fame.
“Abner Doubleday, Santa Claus and Dracula are equally mythic figures,” Thorn has said in the past, confirming his faith in the clever barb for Fox News Digital.
Doubleday Field at Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, is dubbed “The Home of Baseball.”
Cartwright, meanwhile, is called “The Father of Modern Base Ball” on his Hall of Fame plaque. It credits Cartwright with the standards of the game we know today: bases 90 feet apart, nine innings per game and nine men per team.
Major General Abner Doubleday poses for a portrait in the Brady Photo Studios in Washington, D.C., in 1862. For years Doubleday has been given credit as the inventor of baseball. John Thorn, the official historian of Major League Baseball, calls Doubleday’s role in baseball a myth. (Mark Rucker/Transcendental Graphics, Getty Images)
“Everything credited to Cartwright on his Hall of Fame plaque should instead by credited to Doc Adams,” baseball historian Roger Ratzenberger, publisher of DocAdamsBaseball.org, told Fox News Digital.
‘Exercise and good fellowship’
Daniel Lucius “Doc” Adams was born on Nov. 1, 1814 in Mont Vernon, New Hampshire, to Daniel and Nancy (Mulliken) Adams.
The elder Adams was a renowned physician, first in Massachusetts, then New Hampshire. He was a local politician, author and textbook writer whose works were used in classrooms for decades.
Doc Adams was born in Mont Vernon, New Hampshire, on Nov. 1, 1814. The town only in recent years erected a sign acknowledging that its hometown son played a crucial role in the creation of baseball. (Roger Ratzenberger/DocAdamsBaseball.org)
Doc Adams attended college at Amherst and Yale, then medical school at Harvard. He looked to make his name in Gotham, arriving in New York City in 1839 or 1840.
Baseball clubs by the early 1840s had played various forms of the game informally among themselves for several years.
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“Its primary objectives were exercise and good fellowship,” baseball authority Eric Miklich writes on 19Cbaseball.com, his detailed compendium of the early days of the game.
Different clubs might play by different rules, while different cities had various versions of the game. “Town ball” in Philadelphia differed from “base ball” in New York, for example.
Doc Adams joined the New York Knickerbockers Base Ball Club.
Marjorie Adams is the great-granddaughter of Daniel “Doc” Adams, dubbed by some “true father of baseball.” She was critical in raising awareness of his role in shaping American sports history after his influence was lost over time. (Roger Ratzenberger/DocAdamsBaseball.org)
“The players included merchants, lawyers, Union Bank clerks, insurance clerks and others who were at liberty after 3 o’clock in the afternoon,” Adams told The Sporting News in an 1896 interview at age 81.
“They went into it just for exercise and enjoyment, and I think they used to get a good deal more solid fun out of it than the players in the big games do nowadays.”
“Players included merchants, lawyers, Union Bank clerks, insurance clerks and others who were at liberty after 3 o’clock in the afternoon.” — Doc Adams
He soon became one of its leading figures on the field and in the office.
He created a new position called shortstop in 1849 or 1850 — the position first devised to aid relay throws from the outfield; and soon became president of the Knickerbockers.
“The early Knickerbocker ball was so light that it could not be thrown even 200 feet,” Thorn wrote for the Society of American Baseball Research, “thus the need for a short fielder to send the ball in to the pitcher’s point.”
The Red Stocking Baseball Club of Cincinnati Ohio poses for a team photo in a studio in 1869, which was issued as a trade card. The Red Stocking, the first professional baseball team, and the first college football game, both emerged in 1869. They were part of a post-Civil war obsession in America with sports as entertainment. (Mark Rucker/Transcendental Graphics, Getty Images)
Adams took it upon himself to make better baseballs by hand. And he oversaw the birth of the baseball bat industry.
“We had a great deal of trouble in getting balls made, and for six or seven years I made all the balls myself, not only for our club but also for other clubs when they were organized,” Adams told The Sporting News.
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“Finally I found a Scotch saddler who was able to show me a good way to cover the balls with horsehide, such as was used for whip lashes. I used to make the stuffing out of three or four ounces of rubber cuttings, wound with yarn and then covered with the leather. It was not until some time after 1858 that a shoemaker was found who was willing to make them for us. This was the beginning of base ball manufacturing.”
He added, “It was equally difficult to get good bats made, for no one knew any more about making bats than balls. The bats had to be turned under my personal supervision.”
The $3.26 million ‘Magna Carta of Baseball’
The foundation of modern baseball was laid in January and February 1857, in a national convention of baseball players at Smith’s Hotel, 462 Broome Street, in what’s now the SoHo section of Manhattan.
Doc Adams presided over the convention.
Under his leadership, the conference emerged with uniform new rules as the recreational game grew into a larger and increasingly competitive sport.
“The Magna Carta of Baseball” is shown here. The modern rules of baseball were set down at a convention in New York City in 1857, presided over by Daniel “Doc” Adams. His handwritten copy of the “Laws of Base Ball” netted $3.26 million at auction in 2016. (Hayden J. Trubitt)
The 1857 convention gave us the major framework we recognize as baseball today: These include nine innings per game, nine players per side and 90 feet between base paths.
These “Laws of Base Ball,” handwritten by Doc Adams, emerged in recent years and hit the auction block in 2016.
They were purchased by Hayden Trubitt, an attorney with Stradling Yocca Carlson & Rauth in Newport Beach, California, for a cool $3.26 million.
He mortgaged his house to help fund the purchase of what Thorn called the “Magna Carta of Baseball.”
Adams holds a special place in the American sports pantheon.
Trubitt knew little about Doc Adams at the time. He knew only that the documents were important, and that they fulfilled his passions for baseball, law and history.
He’s since come to realize that Adams holds a special place in the American sports pantheon — by following the arc of the rules conventions through the handwriting of its president.
The meeting “was like the U.S. Constitutional Convention,” Trubitt told Fox News Digital.
“It was a beautiful expression of American government sensibilities.”
Hayden J. Trubitt, an attorney with Stradling Yocca Carlson & Rauth in Newport Beach, California, purchased Doc Adams’ handwritten 1857 “Laws of Base Ball” for $3.26 million in 2016. The documents were dubbed “The Magna Carta of Baseball” by Major League Baseball historian John Thorn. (Steven Trubitt)
“The ‘Laws of Base Ball’ is a document of unparalleled importance in the history of America’s National Pastime,” SCP Auctions’ Vice President Dan Imler said in a statement after its sale.
“This [$3.26 million] figure represents not only the highest price ever paid for a baseball document, but the third-highest price ever for any piece of sports memorabilia.”
“This [$3.26 million] figure represents the highest price ever paid for a baseball document.” — SCP Auctions
“With the rules better defined and with the success of the 1857 convention, the game became increasingly popular. Subsequent conventions attracted more teams,” writes Miklich.
“The Civil War caused membership to decrease but helped introduce the game to southern parts of the United States. The membership of the National Association of Base Ball Players increased to more than 300 members in 1867.”
The Cincinnati Red Stockings, the first professional baseball team, formed in 1869.
The National Convention of Base Ball Clubs was held at Smith’s Hotel, 462 Broome Street, in what’s now the SoHo section of Manhattan in the early weeks of 1857. The convention, presided over by Daniel “Doc” Adams, set down the “Laws of Base Ball” still known today, including nine innings per game, nine men per side and 90 feet between bases. The current building on the site was built in 1900. There is nothing to mark the address as the location of a momentous event in American sports history. (Kerry J. Byrne/Fox News Digital)
The National League — the same “senior circuit” that still competes today — was founded in 1876. The American League was formed in 1901.
The first World Series between the competing leagues ensued in 1903. Baseball was off and running, played by the rules Adams set down, played with equipment he pioneered, with his hands touching every aspect of the sport.
He was the first umpire to call balls and strikes in competitive baseball.
Adams authored another baseball first in 1858, the year after the rules convention. Now well into his 40s, he officiated the first all-star game series in Queens, New York, where he was the first umpire to call balls and strikes in competitive baseball.
‘We played until it was too dark to see’
Dr. Daniel Lucius Adams died on January 3, 1899, in New Haven, Connecticut. He was 84 years old.
He’s buried today in Evergreen Cemetery in New Haven, beneath a stone in which the letters have grown worn and muddled, as if his name is being lost to history.
The Knickerbocker Base Ball Club was formed in 1842 by members of the earlier (founded 1837) Gotham Club and wrote down the first rules of the game in 1845. Front row, from left, Duncan Curry, Daniel “Doc” Adams — considered by many the true “father of baseball” — and Henry Tiebout. Back row, from left, Alfred Cartwright, Alexander Cartwright, remembered in baseball lore for recording baseball’s first rules, and William Wheaton. (Public Domain, courtesy Eric Miklich)
Perhaps the neglected memorial soon will get the same renewed attention as the man himself.
His star began to shine again through the research uncovered by Thorn, and by the dogged work by Doc Adams’ great-granddaughter, Marjorie Adams, now deceased, to revive his contribution to the game.
“Free from all restraint, and throwing off our coats we played until it was too dark to see any longer.” — Doc Adams
The nation’s longest-running vintage baseball tournament was renamed the Doc Adams Old Time Baseball Tournament in 2015. It’s held each summer in Bethpage, New York.
Adams enthusiasts now hope he’ll get his long-overdue plaque at the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.
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The Early Baseball Era Committee of the Hall of Fame meets every three years.
Adams was on their 2016 ballot right before his Laws of Base Ball were discovered early that year. He missed induction by two votes.
His next opportunity to be inducted into the Hall of Fame comes in December 2024, when the committee votes on its 2025 inductees.
The Canton Cornshuckers pose for a photo during the 25th Annual Doc Adams Old Time Base Ball Festival at Old Bethpage Village Restoration on August 7, 2022, in Old Bethpage, New York. The event is named for important but largely forgotten baseball pioneer Daniel “Doc” Adams. (Sarah Stier/Getty Images)
Hall of Fame or not, Adam’s greatest contribution may be instilling a nation with a love for the sport he fathered and is now cherished as the National Pastime.
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“Our playground was the Elysian Fields in Hoboken, a beautiful spot at that time, overlooking the Hudson, and reached by a pleasant path along the cliff,” Adams told The Sporting News in 1896.
“Once there we were free from all restraint, and throwing off our coats we played until it was too dark to see any longer.”
To read more stories in this unique “Meet the American Who…” series from Fox News Digital, click here.
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On this day in history, March 30, 1858, American visionary Hymen Lipman patents pencil with eraser
Philadelphia inventor Hymen L. Lipman rushed heroically to the aid of mistake-prone schoolchildren, draftsmen and artists everywhere when he secured the patent for the pencil with eraser on this day in history, March 30, 1858.
“Be it known that I, Hymen L. Lipman, of Philadelphia, in the county of Philadelphia and State of Pennsylvania, have invented a new and useful Lead-Pencil and Eraser;” the visionary wrote in his patent application.
“I make a lead-pencil in the usual manner, reserving about one-fourth of the length, in which I make a groove of suitable size … and insert in this groove a piece of prepared India rubber (or other erasive substance) secured to said pencil by being glued at one edge.”
The eraser, he noted in his application, “is particularly valuable for removing or erasing lines, figures, etc., and not subject to be soiled or mislaid on the table or desk” — as if the purpose of an eraser was unknown to mid-19th century consumers.
Lipman was born to a Sephardic Jewish family in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1817.
Hymen L. Lipman (1817-1893) is credited with registering the first patent for a pencil with an attached eraser on March 30, 1858. (Alamy)
He immigrated to the United States at age 21 and — like sliced-bread inventor Otto Rohwedder — set about reimagining everyday objects for the better.
“Lipman was also America’s first envelope manufacturer, and it was he who had the idea of adding adhesive to the back flap, so as to make sealing easier,” reports Haaretz.com of Israel.
A pencil with an eraser is “particularly valuable for removing or erasing lines, figures, etc., and not subject to be soiled or rnislaid on the table or desk.” — Hyman Lipman
“He devised a method for binding papers with an eyelet that preceded the stapler by two decades. And Lipman was the first to produce and sell blank postcards in the United States, in 1873.”
His pencil with eraser marked perhaps America’s greatest contribution to pencilcraft.
Sheep walking along the Honester Pass of Borrowdale Valley in the Lake District, Cumbriam England, circa 1925. Graphite discovered in Borrowdale in the 1500s proved useful for marking sheepskins — and fueled the rise of the pencil industry. (Daily Mirror/Mirrorpix/Mirrorpix via Getty Images)
The earliest writing tool, a stylus made with lead, dates back to antiquity, including the Egyptian and Roman Empires.
Pencils gained widespread popularity with the discovery of graphite deposits in the Borrowdale Valley in northern England in the 16th century.
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“Although (graphite) resembled coal, it would not burn,” reports the University of Waterloo (Canada) Earth Sciences Museum. “It did, however, prove to be an excellent marker of sheepskins.”
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862). The American author wrote his most famous and enduring work, “Walden, or a Life in the Woods,” in 1854, in Concord, Massachusetts. He “was also renowned for his pencil-making prowess,” according to Pencil.com. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Graphite also boasted one major advantage over the lead used in earlier pencils: graphite is not no poisonous.
“A market for it opened up around the end of the sixteenth century. German miners from Keswick in the early sixteenth century had made more progress mining the graphite from this site,” the university notes.
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Although commonly referred to as the lead pencil, even in Lipman’s patent application, they are actually made of non-toxic graphite.
“Nuremberg, Germany, was the birthplace of the first mass-produced pencils in 1662. Spurred by Faber-Castell (established in 1761), Lyra, Steadtler and other companies, an active pencil industry developed throughout the 19th century industrial revolution,” reports Pencil.com, published by pencil-wood supplier California Cedar Products Co.
The pencil with eraser was patented in the United States by Hymen Lipman, an immigrant from Jamaica, on March 30, 1858. (Alamy/Getty Images)
“Early settlers depended on pencils from overseas until the war with England cut off imports. William Monroe, a Concord, Massachusetts cabinet-maker, is credited with making America’s first wood pencils in 1812.”
Famous Concord resident Henry David Thoreau, whose transcendentalist tome “Walden” remains essential to American letters more than 150 years after it was published, “was also renowned for his pencil-making prowess,” states Pencil.com.
“Henry David Thoreau was also renowned for his pencil-making prowess.” — Pencil.com.
The site highlights several other prominent figures in the history of pencildom.
Italian artist and scientist Leonardo da Vinci, Founding Father Benjamin Franklin and American explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark were all well-documented pencil aficionados.
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Yet before Lipman of Philadelpha, none apparently had the foresight to attach an eraser.
“Despite the usefulness of the innovation Lipman’s new product did not fly off the shelves at first,” pencil enthusiast and blogger Patrick Murfin wrote in 2018.
Pencil with eraser, attached by metal grommet. Hymen Lipman’s original U.S. patent for the pencil and eraser called for it to be attached with glue. (Wodicka/ullstein bild via Getty Images)
The start of the Civil War in 1861 reportedly changed the fortunes of the pencil with eraser — and the fortunes of Mr. Lipman, too.
“War, as it often does, offered an exploding market for pencil manufacturers,” added Murfin.
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“Millions would be needed by the military, industry, and government bureaucracy. Entrepreneur Joseph Reckendorfer recognized the potential and in 1862 bought the patent rights from Lipman for a then astonishing $100,000, more than $2 million in current dollars.”
He went on, “Lipman walked away a very wealthy man.”
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