FACTORALY - E126 ERASERS

Episode Date: February 5, 2026

Erasers have been around for longer than you might think - actually, even before pencils. This week, we're going into erasers in depth. As always, click on the pics and links to ink in so facts on erasers. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello, Bruce. Gooday, Simon. How are you today? I'm feeling fabulous, thank you very much. How are you? I'm feeling equally pretty good, thank you. That's good to hear. And hello to everyone listening to us.

We hope you are all equally well. Who are they listening to? Bruce, what is this all about? Okay, so we are nerds. Yes. We're also, by the way, voiceovers. We use our voices to do stuff. We do.

But apart from that, we have massive brains. we also have a lot of facts inside them. So we tend to be nerdy about stuff. Yes, indeed. And we're nerdy about everything. Pretty much, yeah. There are very few subjects that we won't go down a rabbit hole over. That's true.

But the thing is that what we do is we then create this podcast, which gets some of those facts out of our brains into digital format. And we do occasionally make mistakes. Oh, yeah, sure. We're only human. So when we make mistakes, what we do is we edit. And when we edit, we cut things out. Oh, I see where this is going.

This week, our subject is erasers. Yes, it is. So we've called them erasers, right, on this episode. Yes. Generally, you and I, in common parlance, would call them rubbers. Yes, we would. Except that upsets Americans. Yeah.

Yes. In America, the word rubber refers to, let's just say, a prophylaptic device. Yes. So the word eraser, or, obviously an eraser is something that erases. The word erase comes from Latin eridere, which means to scrape. And that leads to all sorts of things. So eridere leads us to eradicate, to completely wipe out something. Eradere then became iraz, and iraz gives us raise, R-A-Z-E, which also means to scrape. So a razor is a scraper. It scrapes the hair from your face.

Gosh, so you erase the beard? Yes. And that's also where we get to raise something to the ground, which I've often had problems with how do you raise, how do you lift something down to the ground? It's raise spelled R-A-Z-E. Yes. Raised to the ground. It means you scrape it to ground level.

Like razor. Like a razor. There you go. And then IRAZ becomes erase. That's how we get a raise. Well, I'm blessed. Okay, so straight off the bat. something that I have never realized.

I read this fact over and over and over trying to convince myself of whether it was true or not, because it seems preposterous. It's sort of one of those facts that shakes the entire foundation upon which my life has been built to this point. So I've spent 40-something years on this planet, assuming that rubbers are called rubbers because they're made of rubber. Actually, the substance rubber is called rubber after the rubbers.

Right. In 1770 there was an English chemist called Joseph Priestley, who incidentally is the fellow who discovered oxygen, just by the bye. Interesting. Had a good career. He took a piece of what was at the time called gum. You know the sap that you get out of a tree. Yeah, sort of latex.

Latexy, gummy stuff. Okay. He took a piece of that. I don't know why he had it on his desk, but evidently he did. He took a piece of that. and he noticed that he could rub out pencil marks that he was writing or drawing with. So you're saying this is an accident? Yeah, very much so, yeah.

Much like tea. Much like tea, much like all sorts of things that we've done on this show so far. And before this time, people used to use, believe it or not, bits of bread. They used to use breadcrumbs to rub out pencil marks. Okay. And this fellow noticed that this tree gum had properties that, enabled him to to rub things out. And he started referring to the stuff as rubber. Because you rub it. Because you rub it. And that's why rubber is called rubber.

So all of the things you can think of, rubber boots, rubber toys, rubber gloves. They're called rubber because this one fella took a piece of tree gum and used it to rub something out and therefore started calling it rubber. So you can't mention erasers without mentioning. pencils. No, you can't. And one of the things that the pencils made from is the lead inside the pencil, right? Sure. So I, again, I thought, well, it must always have been made from lead. And then I realised that it wasn't ever really made from lead at all. No, pencils have, by and large, never contained lead. No, since 1564, when somebody thought they'd discovered a massive motherload of lead in Borodale they took this lead out of the ground then realized it wasn't lead at all it was

graphite yes by then it was too late people had been calling it lead yeah and then what they would do is they would take this graphite and then make it sort of into like a stick and then wrap this stick up in string or encase it in clay or whatever they wanted to do with this piece of graphite and they would use that to write with because they actually made very good marks on on a simple white sheet of parchment or whatever yeah so what a rubber actually does is it rubs off the graphite from a surface. So it doesn't kind of like absorb it or change its molecular system or whatever.

It just rubs it off. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So when this stuff was first used, as you say, the graphite sort of sticks to the rubber. Yeah. Originally the first rubbers, well, A, natural rubber is perishable. Yes. Therefore, they didn't last very long.

And goes hard and smells horrible. Yeah. Yeah. But also B, the graphite sticks to the rubber. and therefore the next time you use the rubber, the end of your rubber is covered in graphite. So it makes the subsequent rubbings out smudgy. Yes. So they made various differences and changes.

They added various oils. They started using things like vinyl and horribly unpronounceable plastic-related things to make the rubber peel slightly. So, you know, when you use a rubber, you get those little shavings. Yes. And cleverly, the graphite sticks to the end of the rubber, which then crumbles and you sweep off the page. and then you've still got a nice clean rubber to use with. So you said there's no lead in a pencil? Yes.

Quite true. Before pencils, incidentally, a very sort of QI-style question here, which came first the rubber or the pencil? Ah. It's actually the rubber. Really? So pencils per se, which is to say a thin stick of graphite encased in wood, which we all know to be a pencil.

Yeah. Invented in 1795. The eraser invented in 1770. So they were using graphite sticks to write with, but they weren't yet what we know as pencils. So technically the eraser was invented before the pencil. But that's an aside. Anyway, before pencils, before graphite, they did use to use something called lead point. You know when you look at an old artist's drawing from the Middle Ages?

They're slightly shimmery, they're slightly silvery and ghostly looking. Yes, yes. They used to use metal sticks. Da Vinci and Michelangelo used to use something called silver point. It was just a silver rod, which oxidised with a particular coating on the parchment. So you had to pre-treat the parchment in order for that to work. Then they started using lead point, which didn't need the parchment to be treated. So they drew with a stick of lead, which left a very, very faint, ghostly shadow of drawing or writing on the page.

Right. They used to rub that out with, as I said, bits of pred. And also wax. They would actually sort of rub wax really, really hard over the page, and it would just about remove that lead. So although pencils have never contained lead, they did used to use lead before they came up with this graphite in the 1500s. Okay.

Because you talk about wax, I mean, before there was parchment, there were things like wax tablets. There were. So you'd write on wax. or use a stylus to make an indent in wax. Yeah. And then what you would then do with your wax tablet is you would melt it a bit.

So that all the indents would sort of melt back into the wax. Yes. You could erase what you did in wax just by heating it up. And in fact, doesn't a rubber also melt a little bit? Because I know that, you know, you used to be able to buy, you probably still can buy, like typewriter erasers where you had like a sort of like a pencil eraser on one end. there was sort of like pink and on the other end there was like a blue with like a white in the middle

that's right looked like a licorice all sort yes yes right now this is it's it's quite an episode today so this is the second fact that has completely blown my mind i went through the whole of my school life knowing for a fact that that double ended eraser pink on one end blue on the other pink was for pencils blue was for ink i could never quite work out why the ink end didn't work terribly well I have just discovered doing this research that that is not what it was for. The blue end, which was slightly coarser, it had abrasives in it, it had pumice and grit in it.

That was not for ink. That was for heavier pencil markings made on thicker, coarser artists' paper. And what it does, the abrasiveness scratches away the very, very top surface layer of the paper and therefore erases whatever is written on it, whether that's pencil, ink, whatever. So that blue end wasn't for ink, per se. I'm doing air quotes here, which are useless on an audio platform.

It was for thick paper. Because if you used the blue end on ordinary paper, you'd rip a ruddy great hole in it, which I remember doing many a time. I have discovered, which may blow your mind, a way of erasing fountain pen ink from paper. Go on. Step one, take some nail varnish remover.

Okay. Step two, take some cotton wool. Right. Step three, ideally some blotting paper. Mm-hmm. So what you do is you put the blotting paper behind the sheet of paper with the ink on it. Yes. Then you soak the cotton wool with the nail varnish remover and you dab at the ink on the page.

And what happens is the nail varnish remover dissolves the ink. And it goes either into the cotton wool bud or it goes through the paper. Into the potting. into the blotting paper behind it. That's amazing. Yeah. And you can completely clean up any kind of fountain penning using this method. Wow.

Very nice. I like it. We talked about sort of rubbing things out like the layer above. Hmm. There's another bit of when you erase something and there's a layer below called a palimps set. A what, pardon? Palimps set. I've never heard that word before.

Okay, so a palimps set is basically where you write something over something that you've tried to erase but failed. Okay. So you'll see it in ancient writings where they don't want to make a fresh parchment or use fresh paper. So they'll just rub up what's underneath and they'll write on top of it. Oh, I see, right. Okay. But the rubbing up below isn't efficient. Yes. And they're very interesting things for archaeologists and historians to read. Because you can not only read what was written above, but you can also still read what was written below. Yeah, so you can sort of see what they're corrected and what they corrected it too. Yes.

Or even whether there was something entirely different. It's a bit like an artist using the same canvas for another painting, having whitewashed the painting underneath it. Yes. Now that's interesting. I remember using a magnetic eraser to wipe audio cassette tapes.

Yes. And this was just a sort of a block of plastic with a slot in it. It had a couple of heavy-duty magnets inside. And you put your cassette tape through the slot a few times and the magnetic field erased the data that was on the tape. If you didn't do it thoroughly, it would not erase it entirely.

So you can still hear very, very faintly what was on the tape before, having then recorded over it again. But the fact that that exists in writing as well, that's brilliant. There used to be sort of a warning about cassettes, like do not put this near the back of your speakers. Yes, because there are magnets there, yeah. Yes, that's right. Yeah, magnets to erase stuff.

I mean, the other thing is kind of like magnetic, was a very simple way to erase some of my early drawings when I was a very young boy, was to turn over the etcher sketch and give it a shake. Oh, yes. And that was a way of erasing what you'd draw on. You know what, I've never looked into how an etcher sketch works. I'll tell you what, if you know how an etcher sketch works,

you can write to us at hello at factorily.com. Yes. And tell us. Wonderful. I'm sure one of our dear factorialites will know the inner workings of an etcher sketch. Catch? Please get in touch. So you talked about rubber. Rubber is kind of very fragile, volatile, smelly, horrible stuff.

Yes. Unless you're American and a guy called Goodyear. Okay. Oh, Goodyear as in tyres. As in tyres. Ah. So what Goodyear invented was a thing called vulcanisation. Which means turning rubber into Mr Spock. Yes. I saw that term and I thought that's brilliant, yeah.

So vulcanisation is a way of sort of heating rubber so that it loses the smell, it becomes more stable, and then you can use it as an eraser. Oh, I see. That's what that is. I was very tempted to look into the process of vulcanisation and I thought, nah. But you've done it for me. Thank you. Erasing stuff is a very good way because we all make mistakes, right? Yeah, sure. To er is human. Exactly, to forgive divine. But to erase is not always a good idea. Okay.

Because in 1992, a group of French Christian youths were exploring some caves. And they came across this odd little drawing on a cave. And they wanted to make the cave nice and clean and Christian. And so they just erased this thing on the side of the cave, which turned out to be a 15,000-year-old cave painting. No. Oh, whoops. Oops.

But, I mean, that brings us on to erasing graffiti. Oh, sure, yes. Okay. Because around where I live, I mean, there's graffiti everywhere where I live. Yeah. But sometimes it's racist. Sometimes it's just tagging. Sometimes it's just on your front door and you don't want it. Yeah. And the council have a thing where you can sort of use the app and report this graffiti on your door.

And within hours, somebody comes around and paints over it. Really? Yeah. That's wonderful. I've often thought when walking around London and looking at graffiti, what is graffiti and what is graffiti and what is? is street art. Because I think just around the corner from you, there's a whopping great mural of Amy Winehouse

on the side of the building. But there's also some graffiti on top of said mural. So how on earth they go about only erasing the nasty bit of graffiti on top of what is a very beautiful painting without damaging the painting. You can't do it. I don't know. You can't do it. And who gets to decide which one is just graffiti

and which one is artwork and should be allowed to stay? It's a tragedy around him because there are some beautiful pieces of street art. There are. The taggers have just gone and just ruined. Yeah. Shame. So I mentioned earlier on a gentleman in 1770 who was the first one to notice the erasing properties of gum and calling it rubber. He didn't really do anything about it. He noticed it.

He used it. He thought, huh, that's interesting. And then he left it there. But in the very same year, there was another Englishman, an optician and a scientific instrument maker called Edward Nairn. And he developed. He obviously didn't discover the ability of rubber to erase, but he was the first one to sort of market it. And he, again, he claims that he was sort of the first one to notice the fact that it did it by virtue of the fact he went to pick up a lump of bread in order to rub something out and accidentally picked up rubber. but that's almost exactly what the other fella said, so who knows. But anyway, Nairn was certainly the first one to market it. And it was such a brand-new invention, so highly prized and sought after and so on. He set up a shop opposite the Royal Exchange in London, and he sold lumps of rubber for three shillings per half-inch cube.

What? In 1770. I haven't done the maths, but three shillings in 1770 is quite a lot of money. Which just, I guess, shows how effective it was compared to what they'd been using before. You know, the fact that people would actually buy a lump of rubber for three shillings shows that... Well, I guess if you've been using bread before that. Yes, yes, or lumps of wax, which weren't terribly effective, yeah. Yeah.

And then we had various other innovations. Like I said, we sort of started adding oils and different things to it. I found a sentence which the number of words in this sentence that I actually understand is very, very few. And therefore, I'm just going to read it as a sentence. it is, as one of the developments in how rubbers have changed over the years. In various types of eraser, a thermoplastic elastomer combines a styrene resin elastomer and an olophon resin. I don't know what that means. Do you know what? I don't know what that means either. No. But it just shows that, you know, the development of erasers has gone from a lump of gum extracted from a tree to containing

lots of sciencey stuff that I don't understand. And then another development, which seems like such an obvious thing to do now, but at the time was obviously quite revolutionary. In 1858, a fellow called Hyman Lipman in Philadelphia decided to attach one of these erasers to the end of a pencil. Gasp! Fairly obvious thing, you know, we've got a pencil, we've got an eraser, why not put the two together? He filed for a patent for the first ever pencil-tipped eraser, and he was denied it because the patent office decided that actually you haven't invented anything new. All you've done is taken a thing that exists and wedged it on the end of a thing that exists. But it's interesting you mentioned sort of like the mid-19th century.

Because in 1875 there was a massive mistake corrected by erasing stuff. Oh, okay. No, go on. So in 1875, the British Royal Navy updated its charts and officially erased. 123 non-existent islands on its map of the Pacific. Oh my goodness. Sorry, they erased non-existent islands, as if to say those islands were put there but they didn't exist.

Yeah, so the 1864 edition of the Admiralty Chart 2683, which focused on the Pacific, was particularly full of errors. Oh. So this chapter, Sir Frederick Evans, who was the hydrographer to the Admiralty, spearheaded the effort to correct the charts, And for the 1875 edition, he removed over 100 islands that simply didn't exist.

Wow. Unfortunately, he also cut three islands that did exist. Oh, that's a shame. Whoops. But this mass purging was possible because global positioning became easier in the mid-19th century. And he kind of worked out where stuff was. And even after this correction, there were still some phantom islands like Morel Island, which remained on maps for ages.

There's one called Sandy Island near Australia, which was still on maps until 2012. No way. Yeah, it doesn't exist. So on the most recent maps, you'll see Sandy Island not, well, you won't see Sandy Island because it's not there. How does that even, I'm flummoxed,

how on earth, are there that many islands on maps that don't exist? What are people seeing that have led them to think, oh, look, there's an island, I'll draw it. There's an island. I think I'm here. So let's tell the Admiralty that there's an island here. Yes. And you're not there. You're somewhere else. Ah.

So you have the same island probably four or five times in different places. Yes. That's brilliant. Another type of orisa that I looked at briefly was Blackboard erasers. Me too. Did you? Yes. Oh, fantastic.

I wonder if we've got the same information. Honestly, we hardly ever do this. No. We hardly ever research the same thing. Very rarely. So everything that each of us brings is news to the other. Yes. So you're going to tell me about John L. Hammett, aren't you?

I am. Go ahead. Unless you tell me about John L. Hammett. So John L. Hammett owned a school supply store in Boston, again, in the mid-19th century. It seems to be quite a good year for this sort of thing. And up until then, blackboards had been erased by using bits of rag, bits of cloth. So you write with a piece of chalk on a blackboard, little deposits of the chalk stay on the board, you wipe them off with a duster or a cloth or whatever.

And this fellow John Hammett, he discovered that using strips of wool felt was far more effective because it's a bit coarser and the chalk dust gets sort of stuck in the fibres. And so he started putting strips of felt onto a wooden block and that became the blackboard eraser. And that's ubiquitous. You know, schools for the next, however many years, you know, a hundred years before the whiteboard was invented were using blackboard erasers. Very efficient weapons. Well, yes, yes. Lobbing a blackboard eraser at an unruly student, I'm sure, very effective. Yes, I've had more than one lobbed out to me.

And I remember that used to be a task, one of the daily tasks for sort of children helpers in the classroom was, you know, who gets to have the thankless task of cleaning the blackboard erases at the end of the day, which is consisted of taking two blackboard erases, smacking them together, getting a lung full of chalk dust, and then going home. Or it was used as a penalty, you know, for being unruly. But that's blackboard erasers. And then that naturally led me to think about whiteboard erasers, because that's the next generation of blackboard is the whiteboard. Yes.

And I naturally assume that the whiteboard erasers must be special. There must be something magical in them that allows them to actually erase ink from a whiteboard. Nope, they're almost exactly the same product. It's the ink. It's the whiteboard pen that's different. I guess I'm the surface of the whiteboard. So the surface of the whiteboard is very, very slick. Things don't sort of stick to it very easily.

But particularly the whiteboard ink in a whiteboard marker. has a chemical lifting agent in it, which prevents it from sticking to such smooth surfaces. Of course. So the eraser is very, very similar. It's felt or it's sometimes foam, some kind of plastic polymer foam, and you just wipe the stuff off because it's ready to be lifted. It's not naturally trying to cling on to the surface.

But I've just assumed that a whiteboard eraser was inherently different. It really isn't. It's very similar. Interesting. Yeah. Talking of lifting, I used to have an IBM self-correcting golf ball typewriter. You did. I believe you've told me about this.

See our episode on Type? Perhaps. Could well have been, yes. Yeah. But the way that worked was there was like a strip of plastic that had like a film that carried plastic. And this golf ball typewriter would hit paper through this plastic strip. Yes. And that would implant the shape of the plastic onto the paper,

which was the shape of a letter. So each of the letters on the paper wasn't actually ink. This was actually sort of like bits of plastic that hit the paper. Oh, I see. So to self-correct, it had another thin reel of plastic that was sticky. Right. So what would happen is you would go over the same letter and the golf ball would hit the different ribbon.

and that ribbon was the sticky ribbon and that would lift off the piece of type that it had put there. That's genius. Yes. The other way that you can get rid of stuff if you've typed it or if you've drawn it or whatever is to paint over it.

Yes, sure. And there was a typist called Betty Graham. So Betty Graham had a son called Mike. Right. Who took his father's name, which was Nesmith. I don't know if you've ever heard of Mike Nesmith or the monkey. Oh, that Mike Nesmith. So his mum invented a thing called liquid paper.

Right. And we know liquid paper better in this country is Tipx. Oh, you looked into Tipx. Yes. Brilliant. So she was working one day in the office and thought, oh, this, you know, correcting stuff when I've mistyped, it's really annoying. And she thought, I know, I could just paint over it with a nail varnish,

a matte white nail varnish. Oh, is that how it started? So she went home and actually mixed up some white paint, creatively. Put it in a nail varnish bottle and took it to work and started to do this correcting using white paint effectively and then typing over the white paint.

Because the thing about nail varnish is it dries very fast. Sure. And if you get a matte one, it's got a similar texture to paper. Right. So Betty Graham started to manufacture this for the other people in her office and then realized actually that was a business

and built the business up until in 1979 she sold the patent to Gillette for 47.5 million dollars. Oh my goodness. Wow. Yeah. So Mike Nesmith was not an underprivileged kid growing up. That's amazing.

Yeah. I remember using TIPX at school. The teachers really frowned upon it. It was sort of an unwritten rule. You've written this thing in ink. It's now committed to the paper. How dare you come along with your mom. modern fancy stuff and wife over it.

But not that modern or fancy by the sounds of it. No, no, no, absolutely not. No. Car, I can't even remember the last time I used Tip X. I can smell it now. I can smell the stuff in my imagination. Wow. So there are modern types of eraser, obviously.

Sure. On my phone, if there's like a random in the background of a picture, I can erase that person using what's called magic eraser. Oh. Right, yeah. And I can take them out of the picture. And then through an algorithm that looks at the rest of the picture and works at what could have been behind the guy

that's getting in the way of the picture, it puts in something to replace the guy that's there in the picture. And it looks like he was never there. It's very odd, isn't it? I mean, the technology to erase parts of a photograph is sensational. I mean, it's mostly a very clever algorithm that looks at various different pixels and works at what the next. pixel is likely to be.

It basically takes a guess. Yes. And then it analyzes the guess against all the pictures that it knows, because it's Google. So it's got every single picture in the world on it. And it sort of goes, well, this is the color of the background to that side of the guy. That's the color of the background to the right side of the guy. The stuff directly behind him is probably going to look like this. Therefore, that's what I'll put in.

And then it puts it in and goes, does that look right to me? Yeah. And maybe not. Let's try it again, try it again, try again. So all of those things happen in fractions of seconds. Yeah. And then eventually your phone comes back and goes, he's gone. Whereas I remember spending an awfully long time back in the day using Photoshop and the like.

Yes. To carefully cut around the edge of the thing that you wanted to take and then copying bits from the neighboring areas and putting them in place. It took absolutely forever. Now it's a button. Well, yes. But before that, there was a thing called retouching. Oh, yes. Because there's a retouching tool on photo.

shop. Yes. So retouching actually was a guy with a paintbrush. Oh, is that right? Yeah, who would retouch the picture. Oh. Sometimes like a paintbrush with like one or two hairs on the paintbrush, that, that detailed. Wow. And just go in and very gradually paint out the bit in the right kind of colours of colours or greys. Yeah. Usually black and white pictures easier. Sure. So you get like various different grays and you paint out the person or the whole thing that's getting in the way of the So a retoucher used to be a human role. Yes. Which then became a tool in Photoshop.

Yes. Which has now become an AI function that does it in a split a second. Yes. Gosh, that's progress for you. So I looked at sort of modern erasers and things like that. And then the use of erasers in film. Right. There is a film called eraser.

Brilliant. So, okay, it just goes to show what we have learned to expect from each other. because I have a vague memory of there being a movie in the 90s called Eraser. And I thought, I won't even touch that because I bet Bruce is going to mention it. And here we are, dear listeners. So, yes, it was an Arnold Schwarzenegger film. That's right. It's basically about a guy whose job is to make people look as though they're dead.

Oh, fun. And take pictures of it. And so everybody assumes they're dead. Oh, I see, right, to fake a death. They're not really. And then they kind of like get relocated somewhere else. So he erases them. It's a bit like in the 1930s they used this expression rubbing out people.

Oh yes, they did. Yeah, very sort of gangster in terminology. Which means to erase him from record. So yeah, so Eraser, because I was doing this, I thought, maybe I should just watch that again. So I watched it again. It's a great film. Did you?

In the name of researching for this episode, you went and watched Eraser? I go that far, Simon. Wow, Bruce. I'm impressed. The one I didn't watch was. It was Eraserhead. I don't know that one. So Eraserhead is a David Lynch film, and it is David Lynch at his maddest best.

Okay. It is very, very, very weird. And if you're on any kind of drugs or slightly drunk, it's a very good thing to watch. The producers of factorily are in no way endorsing the use of drugs or alcohol. No. But they make this film more interesting. Sure. One of the things I looked into, because it was erasers, there's a place in Derwent called the Pencil Museum.

Yes, there is, yes. And I think there's the biggest pencil in the world, or the biggest pencil in the UK or something like that. So there must be records for erasers. Yes, there are. Okay. Let's hear what they are, Simon. Okay, well, since you've mentioned that, I think that might be the largest pencil in the UK, you say, there is a Guinness World Record for the largest pencil eraser.

Oh. Which interestingly is not the same as the record for the largest pencil. But that's by the by. Okay. A gentleman called Ashita Furman in St. Louis, Missouri. He created a pencil in 2007. Scale, you know, a scale version entirely made of wood filled with, I'm not sure what it's filled with actually. But, you know, it's made of word.

It looks like a pencil. Right. But it's huge. How huge? Well, the pencil itself. I can't believe I'm saying this out loud really. The pencil as a whole measures 23 and a bit meters long. So about 75 feet.

So tricky to pick up. Very tricky to pick up. Yeah. The eraser bit is two and a half feet long and it's made of eraser material. It's rubbery. It looks like an eraser on the end of a pencil. Massive. It currently sits in the St. Louis Museum in Missouri.

Okay. But that's not the record for the largest pencil because the largest pencil is the diameter of the pencil made out of polystyrene so it's flexible and it's miles long, literally miles long but it's only got a regular eraser tip at the end so that doesn't have the same. And is it full of graphite as well?

Yeah, yeah, it's full of graphite that's been mixed with something or other to make it slightly bendy. So that's the longest pencil but it's not the biggest eraser so that's a bit confusing. We have a record for the largest collection of erasers. Petra Engels in Germany currently has a collection of 19,571 unique individual erasers. Wow. So it's not that she's got a hundred of the same type.

She has 19.5,000 individual not duplicated erasers. So these are like different shapes. Different shapes, sizes, colours, materials, all sorts. collected from over 110 different countries she started collecting them as a kid in 1981 and it sort of became a running joke

her family started buying her erasers for birthday and Christmas and so on and now 19 and a half thousand erasers she has the record for that then I can't even picture how this even works but the longest ever eraser shaving oh it's like peeling an apple

so when you got like a penit of pencil sharp note. It is, but it isn't. I thought that one, I first looked at it. I thought someone's just sat there with a knife and they've sort of, you know, shaved around an eraser. Yes. They actually did it by rubbing it on paper. You know, when you rub something out on paper, you get little shavings. Yes. If you do it really carefully, you can get one long shaving. You know, you sometimes get a shaving that's a couple of centimeters long and you feel, you know, quite impressed. Cool, look at the size of that. Yes. This person, uh, Masamitsutanaka in Tokyo, in 2014. He deliberately set out to make a record for the world's longest eraser shaving 30 feet.

Just by rubbing his eraser back and forth on a surface, not by using a knife or anything like that to carve it off. Just a natural shaving. It took him two hours. One eraser? One eraser. Yeah. Wow. Isn't that phenomenal? That must have been really thin. Yes, it must have been. Very thin. that's absolutely bizarre but quite impressive. That's very impressive. Those are my eraser-related records. Thank you very much, Simon.

That was fascinating. Pleasure as always. Well, I've run out of Eraser Facts. Yes, I think all of those facts have been erased from my memory and implanted into the memory of the people listening. Yes, hopefully they will be erased from my memory as well. Because otherwise, my brain is already full of such useless information. It gets clogged up.

up up there, doesn't it? It does. It does. A lot of it needs cleaning out and erasing. Yes, quite right. But thank you so much for listening. Yes, thank you. Before you go, could we ask you to do a couple of favours for us? Oh, go on. Could you please give us a five eraser review on your podcast player of choice? That seems like a good number. I think so. Yeah. And maybe leave a comment or something if you've enjoyed it. Please do. There's other things that we'd like you to do as well, aren't there, Simon? Certainly. We would love it if our dear could go and tell all of their nerdy geeky friends about this podcast. There must be scores of people sitting around thinking to themselves. I wonder what the history is of the humble eraser.

I mean, word of mouth is a really important thing for podcasts. Very much so. So go and tell your friends, your colleagues, your strangers in the street, hey, go and listen to this podcast because it's fun. And we also have socials. We don't really use them. But you can. You're very welcome to contribute to our socials.

We have a Facebook page, we have an Instagram page. Just put something on there. If you've got a fun eraser fact, then just chuck it in there. Please do. Or correct us because we've surely got something wrong. Absolutely, yes. And also if you hit the subscribe button on your podcast player, then every Thursday morning you will get a brand new notification saying,

hey, there's a new episode. Go and listen. So thank you all so much for coming to listen to us chatting about erasers. Please come again next time for. another fun-filled factual episode of factorily. Bye-bye. Ovo-wa.