History
Joseph W. Binney founded the Peekskill Chemical Company in 1864 in the town of Peekskill, New York. It produced pigments for use in industrial applications, such as paint. In 1885 the company changed ownership and came into the hands of Edwin Binney and his cousin Harold Smith, who changed the company̵7;s name to Binney & Smith.
The cousins continued to expand the company and by 1900 had introduced slate pencils, which were sold mostly to the educational market. They added a dustless chalk for classroom use and in 1903 introduced nontoxic wax crayons to their company̵7;s product line. They also moved the company to Easton, Pennsylvania, where it was closer to the source of slate that was used in their pencils. Eventually, in 2007, the company changed its name to Crayola LLC, based on the popularity of its flagship product, the Crayola Crayon.
Edwin̵7;s wife, Alice Stead Binney, is credited with naming the new crayons. She took two French words, ̶0;craie,̶1; meaning chalk, and ̶0;ola,̶1; meaning oleaginous (oily), and combined them into the name ̶0;Crayola.̶1; The very first box of Crayola Crayons went on the market in 1903 and sold for a nickel. In 1920 Binney & Smith introduced art crayons, and the color line was expanded to 48 colors. Then, in 1958, the 64-color boxed assortment of Crayola Crayons went on sale. The box also included a novelty: a built-in crayon sharpener. By 2000, the company produced 120 colors of crayons.
Favorite Crayon Colors
The top-ten favorite crayon colors were determined in 2000 during a ̶0;color census.̶1; More than 25,000--children and adults--voted for their favorite color of Crayola crayons. The number-one spot went to the color blue. Blue was the hands-down favorite for both children and adults, and for both men and women. In the overall results of the color census, all of the other top-ten colors, except cerise, are blue or blue-green in color.
New and Retired Colors
Sometimes crayon colors just seem to outlive their usefulness. In 1990, Binney & Smith retired eight of its once-loved colors and placed them in the Crayola Hall of Fame in Easton, Pennsylvania. Those colors were blue gray, green blue, maize, lemon yellow, orange yellow, orange red, raw umber and violet blue. Since then, other colors have also been retired, including blizzard blue, magic mint, lemon yellow, mulberry and teal blue. The original eight colors, however, are still available and continue to be sold, both in the eight-count boxes and as parts of larger crayon assortments.
As the old colors are retired, Crayola replaces them with new ones that have imaginative names, such as vivid tangerine, electric lime, timber wolf, inch worm and outer space. Some of the original colors have been renamed along the way, too: Prussian blue was changed to midnight blue in 1958; in 1962 flesh was changed to peach; and in 1999 Indian red was changed to chestnut.