Before the Undo Command, There Was the Electric Eraser

I’m fascinated with the early 20th-century zeal for electrifying everyday things. Hand tools, toasters, hot combs—they all obviously benefited from the jolt of electrification. But the eraser? What was so problematic about the humble eraser that it needed electrifying? A number of things, it turned out. According to Hermann Lukowski in his 1935 patent application for an apparatus for erasing, “Hand held rubbers are clumsy and cover a greater area than may be required.” Aye, there’s the rub, as it were. Lukowski’s cone-tipped electric eraser, he argued, could better handle the fine detail. An electric eraser could also be a timesaver. In the days before computer-aided drawing and the ease of the delete and undo commands, manually erasing a document could be a delicate operation. Consider the careful technique Roscoe C. Sloane and John M. Montz suggest in their 1930 book Elements of Topographic Drawing. To make a correction to a map, these civil engineering professors at Ohio State Un ... Read full article.