In 1903, the husband and wife team of Edwin and Alice Binney created the first wax crayon. Mr. Binney and his cousin, C. Harold Smith, owned a colorant company called the Binney and Smith Company, which, on July 10 of that year, introduced the couple’s new product—Crayola crayons. In the century-plus since, the company (now officially the Crayola company) has introduced more than 400 different colors of crayons, of which 133 are considered “standard” colors available in their pack of 120. (Crayola has retired thirteen colors over the years, including Blue Gray in 1990 and Thistle in 2000.) In recent years, Crayola produces 3 billion crayons each year, and over its history it has produced well over 100 billion crayons.
Emerson Moser was one of the people responsible for many of those crayons. He was a Crayola employee working as a crayon molder—a person who pours the molten wax into the molds, shaping it into the recognizable (and useful) crayon shapes as it dries. For more than thirty years, day in and day out, Moser made crayons. Roughly 100 times a day, he’d pour wax into molds designed for 2,400 crayons. Over the course of his career, he molded an estimated 1.4 billion crayons. Periwinkle or Peach, Burnt Sienna or Burnt Umber, it didn’t matter the color.
That last part—that the color didn’t matter—that’s pretty important. Because when he retired, Emerson Moser admitted he was colorblind.
The infirmity was, of course, something you’d normally not want from a man whose job it was to make one of ten dozen different colors. However, Moser’s colorblindness, he’d later explain to the Associated Press, was slight; his biggest problem was determining the difference between similar shades of blues and greens. (That’s probably not all that strange—can many of us really tell the difference between Aquamarine and Turquoise Blue, or between Jungle Green and Fern, for example?) He told reporters that he found out he was colorblind in 1953, when a doctor discovered the issue during a routine physical exam, but “it was so slight that if the doctor wouldn’t have tested me, I probably would have never noticed it.”
His job didn’t involve making sure that the right labels were on the right crayons, anyway—the crayons, after hardening in the molds, went to another area for that part of the manufacturing process. That being the case, the company was okay with the odd little fact that their most senior crayon molder wasn’t able to differentiate between all 120 colors. Besides, Moser was a top employee: as of his retirement in 1990, Moser’s record of 1.4 billion crayons molded stood above anyone else in the company.
In 1962, Crayola introduced Peach as one of the colors in its forty-eight-pack. It wasn’t a new color, though. The color was originally introduced in 1949 under the name “Flesh,” even though not all children have peach-colored skin tones.
On February 6, 1996, Crayola molded its 100 billionth crayon, officially speaking. (It’s an estimate—there’s no reason to believe that Crayola kept an accurate count.) To celebrate, the company had a special molder come in to make the historic crayon. Not Emerson Moser, though—that honor went to Fred Rogers, better known from Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood.