What Would Writers Do Without Erasers?
Photo Credit: J. Howeth
As I labor over my own manuscripts, I sometimes give thought to the lives of authors before the invention of typewriters and computer keyboards. Everything written in longhand. And the potential for mistakes! The entire endeavor of writing a novel must have been agonizing. War and Peace? I find it hard to imagine today as a 21st century writer with our technological advantages. Even 100 years ago the ease with which a writer logged two thousand words a day on a typewriter was miles ahead of writing by hand.
I have absolutely no proof of this, but I’m guessing that the speed our technology affords us also compels us to think faster. How many times have I lost a phrase while sitting at my keyboard just because my fingers cannot keep up with my brain! This is pure hypothesis, but I envision authors prior to a couple hundred years ago (the first prototype of the typewriter was invented in 1867) wrote with a leisureliness – an essence of mindfulness at a manageable pace that coordinated the hand and the brain. Instead of deleting or backspacing, when necessary, writers either struck out words and phrases, sentences and whole paragraphs in their rough drafts and continued to write with a joy that I suspect I often fail to experience because I am usually in such a hurry. Alternately, if they weren’t scratching out words, they had an eraser within short reach.
Photo Credit: J. Howeth
The Eraser! What a magical tool that must have been for writers, composers, bookkeepers, crossword puzzle aficionados - anyone who used paper. Americans tend to think that the rubber eraser is named after the rubber plant from which it comes, but the word really just referred to anything used for rubbing-out mistakes. In their own fashion, they’ve always existed – anything used to rub out marks on parchment or anything resembling it was referred to as a “rubber.” This included wax, stone, and even stale bread. Then in 1770 Edward Nairne inadvertently picked up a piece of raw rubber, which at that time was used to waterproof fabric, and discovered its erasing properties. He started selling chunks of the wonder material, but the drawback was that raw rubber was perishable, so these erasers still weren’t consistently functional. It wasn’t until the process for vulcanizing rubber was first conceived in 1839 by self-taught chemist Charles Goodyear that the eraser as we know it was born.
But let’s back up a second; erasers at this stage of their development weren’t helpful for anything written in ink. Instead, people used pumice or sandstone if available. Or they did a lot of scratching out. Think of the old manuscripts you’ve seen that were written with a quill (I’m thinking of a Jane Austin manuscript I got to see). There were lots of strikethroughs and notes in the margins exposing her revisions. Unless she was going to switch to pencil AND happened to have a new-fangled item called an “eraser” at hand, what option did she have?
Some very famous authors still write their books this way today – longhand in pen - Neil Gaimen and J.K. Rowling - the Internet tells me. There is science to support the benefits of writing longhand. Research shows that the exercise engages the brain differently than typing and improves cognitive development. Besides that, there’s the “slowing down” part of the activity that must be beneficial to anyone living in this fast-paced century in which information is quickly delivered and ingested.
Photo Credit: J. Howeth
I don’t have the patience to write this way. And I rarely use pencils, so I’m not a frequent user of erasers, but I do admire them. Mostly because of what they symbolize. They aren’t tools of correction so much as tools that let you change your mind. Not wrong. Just an alternate direction. It seems to me, in this century of quintessential technology, the ages-old eraser has been replaced by a metaphorical eraser - that unassuming little “delete” key, has become the 21st century’s “rubber.” There’s no way to measure it, but that eraser I wear out!
PITCH: The vulcanized rubber eraser as we know it today wasn’t invented until 1839; what part has it played in the lives of writers and is today’s “delete” button our modern eraser?
