Mysterious Things about Crayola Crayons

I have been doing some research about Crayola crayons. I want to share the things I learned with you in this blog post.

The Crayola factory is located in the eastern Pennsylvania. According to an article, there are more than 600 employees in the factory. Did you know that Crayola makes about 3 billion crayons a year? Crayola was invented in 1902 and an 8-pack crayon box was only 5 cents or 1 nickel. A video said 2000 boxes of crayons were made per hour! Crayons in the 1950s got more fun names such as razz matazz, asparagus, inch worm, and purple mountains’ majesty. The crayon wrappers have three languages for the color name in three languages, English, French and Spanish.

Emerso Mose was an employee of the factory, but he was color blind, which is so surprising to me because you should be able to see color to work at a crayon factory. But he probably inspired many people to do what they want even if they are color blind.

First, water and various chemicals are mixed in big wooden tanks to create pigments. They give crayons their color. Next, each color solution passes through a filter press that squeezes out extra water, leaving moist cakes of color. The cakes of color are scrapped of the press, broken up by hand and put into stacked plastic trays. The trays are baked for three to four days. Then a machine called a pulverizer grinds the colors into a fine powder and is sent to a crayon manufacturing plant. Outside the plant are many storage tanks that hold heated liquid max. Liquid paraffin wax is pumped through large pipes into mixing vats inside the plant and the colored pigment is poured into each vat of clear wax. A rod inside the mixing vat stirs the colored pigment and clear wax, creating colored wax. The colored wax is heated to about 240 degrees, is piped from mixing vat onto rotary mold tables. There are little holds and the wax flows into the holes, which are molds for crayons. The rotary mold table moves slowly in a circular motion.

Inside the table are pipes filled with cold water between 40 and 70 degrees depending upon the color being made. The hot wax is cooled by the water for four to seven minutes depending on the color being made. As the max cools, it hardens. The crayons are checked for broken tips or chipped butt ends. Damaged ones are returned to the mixing vat to be melted and remolded. Labeling machines wrap and glue the label around each crayon.

Meanwhile a small number of crayons from each batch have been taken to the quality control lab to be tested. The crayons are put into machines that pack them up into boxes.

Leftover crayons are called lefolas and the factory used blue leftolas to create the world’s largest crayon. If all the crayons were lined up end to end, they would cover the world six times!

Crayons are very helpful in school or doing art projects for kids. They help kids boost their imagination, and they learn to be creative.