Crayola: The 1891 Patent That Has Nothing to Do With Crayons

By Matthew Partsch · Owl and Twig Vintage · October 1, 2026

Edwin Binney's earliest patent has nothing to do with crayons. It covers a machine for making carbon black, filed six years before anyone at the company thought about wax and pigment. The formula that actually built Crayola was never patented at all.

What Binney & Smith made before crayons

Crayola is a wax-and-pigment company that spent its first two decades in a completely different business. Edwin Binney took over his father Joseph's carbon-black operation, the Peekskill Chemical Works, in 1885, and ran it with his cousin C. Harold Smith under the name Binney & Smith. Carbon black — the fine soot produced by burning oil or gas under controlled conditions — was an industrial pigment, used in printing ink, paint, and the black coating on enameled leather. It had nothing to do with children's art supplies.

That pigment business is also where the company's first patent came from, and it is not the patent most people assume exists.

The 1891 patent that has nothing to do with crayons

U.S. Patent No. 453,140, filed March 9, 1891 and granted May 26, 1891 under the title "Apparatus for the Manufacture of Carbon-Black," is Edwin Binney's own patent, with Harold Smith listed as an assignee holding a one-half interest. It describes a chamber that catches carbon as it deposits off burning oil or gas, with internal scrapers and a conveyor that remove the soot automatically instead of requiring a worker to scrape it off by hand. The patent's own language is explicit about the goal: continuous, automatic operation that cuts labor costs and waste while producing a softer, better-colored black than the older method of flame-on-metal impingement.

Why the crayon formula itself was never patented

A U.S. patent is a twenty-year monopoly traded for public disclosure: the applicant has to describe the invention well enough that someone skilled in the field could reproduce it, and that description becomes public the moment the patent is granted. A trade secret works the opposite way. It protects an invention for as long as nobody else figures it out independently, with no disclosure and no expiration date, provided the owner actually keeps it secret.

Binney & Smith picked the second option for the thing that actually made Crayola valuable. More than 600 crayon shades have shipped since 1903, and the exact wax-and-pigment formula behind them remains undisclosed, protected as a trade secret rather than a patent. That is a deliberate, and in hindsight obviously correct, choice: a 1903 patent on a wax crayon formula would have expired around 1923, after which any competitor could have copied it freely. A trade secret, kept quietly for twelve decades, has already outlasted what a patent could ever have offered.

A trademark trail younger than the product

If a 1903-dated patent doesn't exist for the crayon itself, a 1903-dated federal trademark registration for the word CRAYOLA doesn't survive today either — and for an ordinary reason. Federal trademark registrations lapse if they aren't renewed, and a company that has sold a product continuously for over a century typically ends up refiling the same mark, in different goods classes, again and again, rather than running on one continuous century-old filing.

Searching the current federal trademark record for CRAYOLA turns up a scatter of registrations, each tied to a specific class of goods and each considerably younger than 1903. The oldest one this guide could confirm, Registration No. 1,173,166, covers "art and craft paints and art and craft brushes sold in the form of kits" and children's art paper. It states a first-use-in-commerce date of 1956, but it wasn't filed with the USPTO until July 30, 1979, and wasn't registered until 1981. A separate registration for CRAYOLA on children's clothing states first use in 1981 but wasn't filed until 1982. Neither one is a crayon-class registration at all.

One 2024 filing is the opposite of obscure. On July 2, 2024, the USPTO granted Crayola Properties, Inc. Registration No. 7,431,203 for the scent of a Crayola crayon itself — described in the filing as "a slightly earthy soap scent with pungent, leather-like clay undertones." An examining attorney initially refused it on the grounds that the smell was a functional byproduct of the wax-and-pigment formula rather than a brand identifier, and the application spent roughly six years working through appeal before the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board sided with Crayola on secondary meaning: enough consumers associate that specific smell with the brand, independent of its function, for the scent itself to work as a trademark.

The colors that got renamed

Crayola has renamed exactly three colors in its history, each for a different reason, and each is dateable to the year.

The 1999 rename is the best documented of the three because Crayola turned it into a public event. The company opened a contest for a replacement name and received more than 250,000 entries from nearly 100,000 people between the ages of three and ninety. "Chestnut" won, submitted independently by 155 different entrants, each of whom received a certificate and a 64-color box bearing the new name. Rejected suggestions on record include "red clay," "mars red," and, as a Prince reference, "the crayon formerly known as Indian Red." The new name shipped on roughly 15 million crayons starting in September 1999.

How to date a vintage box

Crayola did not print a manufacture date on its packaging for most of the twentieth century, so dating a box comes down to reading its design and hardware rather than a printed year.

• No UPC barcode means pre-1970s production. Universal Product Code barcodes did not exist before 1974 and were not standard on mass-market packaging until the later 1970s. A box with no barcode anywhere on it predates that rollout; a box with one postdates it.
• No style or code number also points pre-1970s. Later Crayola packaging carries a style number and a longer code number printed on the box or the inner wrapper (for example, Style 52-0064 and Code 52-0064-0-202 on a 1990-era 64-count box). Boxes from the 1958 debut of the 64-count assortment carry neither number.
• The built-in sharpener dates the 64-count box to 1958 or later, and the patent number on it narrows the year further. The sharpener built into the 64-count box references U.S. Patent 2,587,881 on early examples. A 64-count box with no sharpener, or with a sharpener that doesn't cite that number, is either a different count or a later packaging revision.
• Color names inside the box can date it within a few years. Prussian Blue appears only in boxes made before 1958; Flesh appears only before 1962; Indian Red appears only before 1999. A box containing any of those three names predates the corresponding rename, and a box with the replacement name postdates it.
• Logo style shifted in the mid-1960s. Collectors who track box design closely place the end of the older, 1950s-style logo treatment at 1963, with a new logo appearing the following year. A box carrying the earlier logo style alongside a 1958-and-later feature, like the built-in sharpener, narrows to roughly 1958-1963.

How to tell a real one

• Check the maker's name on the box, not just the Crayola name. Pre-2007 boxes should credit Binney & Smith somewhere on the packaging; the company only became Crayola LLC in 2007. A box claiming to be vintage but crediting "Crayola LLC" cannot predate that renaming.
• Weigh the crayon count against what that count's debut year could have contained. The 8-count, 30-count, 51-count and 54-count assortments all trace to 1903; the 16-count followed in 1910; the first 48-count box did not exist before 1949; the 64-count did not exist before 1958; nothing larger than 64 existed before 1972. A box claiming an early date with a crayon count that wasn't introduced until decades later is internally inconsistent.
• A retired color name is a feature, not damage. Finding Prussian Blue, Flesh, or Indian Red printed on a wrapper or box is a genuine period marker, not a sign of a reproduction — reproductions and modern commemorative sets generally use the current, renamed color list even when the box art is styled to look old.
• The exact pigment formula cannot verify anything. Because the recipe is a trade secret rather than a disclosed patent, there is no published chemical specification to test an individual crayon against. Authentication here rests entirely on the box, the wrapper text, and the hardware — not laboratory analysis of the wax itself.

The look-alikes

Chasing a specific vintage Crayola box or another piece of early art-supply ephemera for the shop or your own collection?

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What a vintage box sells for now

Realized auction prices for vintage Crayola boxes are scarce. A circa-1930s box of Rubens Crayola Crayons (No. 24), sold by Antique Arena Inc. in an August 2024 sale, carried a presale estimate of $100 to $150; the actual hammer price was not publicly disclosed. That is the only auction-house figure for an early box this guide could locate, and it is an estimate rather than a confirmed sale.

Everything else available is an asking price. Empty vintage box lots, with no crayons and no specific decade claimed, have listed for as little as $12. Sealed, unopened assortment boxes from more recent decades — not antiques, just old factory stock — have listed in the same low range. No seller-reported or auction price for an early, complete, boxed Crayola set from the 1900s-1920s could be confirmed by this guide; treat any number quoted for one as a seller's asking claim unless it comes with its own documentation.

Looking for other early twentieth-century art, school, or paper ephemera for the shop or your own collection?

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For another guide built around a trademark record that turns out to predate the patent most people assume came first, see Bakelite: the trademark filed before the patent. For another guide where a brand name's federal trademark record disagrees with the popular origin story, see PAAS Easter egg dye: the trademark that predates the popular origin story. See more Field Guides