Sunday, April 27, 2008

Did you know.........

Everything you ever wanted to know about crayons.


The first box of Crayola crayons was sold in 1903 for a nickel and included the same colors available in the eight-count box today: red, blue, yellow, green, violet, orange, black and brown.
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In the last 98 years, more than 100 billion Crayola crayons have been made.
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Most Crayola crayon color names are taken from the U.S. Commerce Department’s National Bureau of Standards book called "Color: Universal Language and Dictionary of Names." Many crayon names are also borrowed from traditional artists’ paints.
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The average child in the United States will wear down 730 crayons by his 10th birthday (or 11.4 boxes of 64s). Kids, ages 2-8, spend an average of 28 minutes each day coloring. Combined, children in the US spend 6.3 billion hours coloring annually, almost 10,000 human lifetimes!
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Crayola crayon color names rarely change. However, there are exceptions. In 1958, Prussian blue was changed to midnight blue in response to teacher recommendations that children could no longer relate to Prussian history. In 1962, the colour flesh was changed to peach recognizing that not everyone’s flesh is the same shade.
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The name Crayola was coined by Alice Binney, wife of company founder Edwin, and a former school teacher. She combined the words craie, which is French for chalk, and ola, for oleaginous, because crayons are made from petroleum based paraffin.

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