It's time to sharpen your knowledge of pencil history! (Bet you can't guess what the first erasers were made of.) ...

Almanac: The pencil and eraser And now a page from our "Sunday Morning" Almanac: March 30th, 1858, 156 years ago today . . . the day a Philadelphia inventor made his mark.

Then mother held a sharp-tipped pencil and began writing on a crisp, milky-white paper. Emily watched her mother wrote a sentence on the paper then she erased and wrote something again.

They invented the modern pencil in 1662. In 1822, a British man named Sampson Mordan invented the first mechanical pencil. And it would change the game for writing tools. The eraser ...

Buck up, Nancy. Either stay true to what the pen was designed for, or switch to something less permanent. There's nothing wrong with a bright yellow pencil and an eraser to match.