The Pencil Eraser Patent: Sold for $100,000, Thrown Out by the Supreme Court

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

Hymen Lipman patented gluing a plug of rubber into the end of a pencil in 1858. Joseph Reckendorfer paid him a reported $100,000 for the rights and sued the company that still makes pencils today. He lost: the Supreme Court ruled that fastening two already-known things together is not an invention.

A patent nobody could enforce

Every pencil with an eraser on its end traces back to a patent that a court eventually ruled should never have been granted. Hymen Lipman, a Philadelphia stationer, patented the idea of gluing a plug of india-rubber into a groove cut in a pencil's wood on March 30, 1858. A speculator named Joseph Reckendorfer bought the rights four years later, sued one of the country's biggest pencil makers for copying the idea, and lost at the U.S. Supreme Court in 1875. The Court's reasoning still shapes patent law: putting two already-known things on one handle, with neither one changing how the other works, is not an invention. It is an assembly.

The ruling did nothing to stop the eraser-tipped pencil from becoming the standard American pencil. The company that won the lawsuit, Eberhard Faber, patented its own, different way of attaching an eraser sixteen years later, and that construction, not Lipman's, is the one still in production. The object survived its own founding patent's failure.

Why rubber waited until 1839

The rubber eraser predates the eraser-tipped pencil by nearly ninety years. English engineer Edward Nairne is credited with selling the first ones around 1770, after reportedly reaching for a piece of rubber instead of bread crumbs, the material people had used to lift graphite marks until then. Joseph Priestley, the chemist who discovered oxygen, documented the discovery in an April 1770 footnote: he had seen "a substance excellently adapted to the purpose of wiping from paper the mark of a black-lead pencil." Nairne charged three shillings for a half-inch cube, a price that kept the rubber eraser a costly novelty rather than an everyday tool.

Natural rubber also perished quickly, turning brittle or sticky within months. Charles Goodyear's 1839 discovery of vulcanization, a curing process that made rubber stable and durable, is what turned the eraser from a gentleman's curiosity into a product a stationer could stock. Lipman filed his pencil-and-eraser patent nineteen years after vulcanization made a durable rubber eraser commercially practical, not immediately after Nairne's original discovery seventy years earlier. The gap between a technology becoming possible and a consumer object actually using it shows up again and again in this kind of object history, and the pencil eraser is one more case of it.

Two inventors, two fixes

Lipman was not the only person trying to permanently attach an eraser to a pencil. Lipman's patent, US 19,783, claims "the combination of the lead and india-rubber or other erasing substance in the holder of a drawing-pencil," built by reserving roughly a quarter of the pencil's length, carving a groove, and gluing a prepared piece of rubber into it. Either end could then be sharpened, the rubber end into a point fine enough to erase between close-set lines on a drawing.

A separate inventor, a Philadelphia artist named Blair, patented a different mechanism nine years later: US Patent 66,938, granted July 23, 1867, for a rubber eraser with a hole molded into it, sized so the pencil's end could be pushed in and held by the rubber's own elasticity. No glue, no carved groove, no wood modification at all. Lipman's design modifies the pencil; Blair's design modifies only the eraser. Both patents eventually reached the Supreme Court, and both lost, within a year of each other.

The hundred-thousand-dollar sale

Lipman did not fight for his own patent in court. In 1862, by multiple secondary accounts, he sold the rights to Joseph Reckendorfer for $100,000, a striking sum for the period and one repeated across modern retellings of the story. That figure does not appear anywhere in the surviving Supreme Court or circuit court opinions, which record the legal history of the patents but not the private sale price between Lipman and Reckendorfer. It should be read as a widely reported but court-unverified detail, not a documented fact in the same category as the patent numbers and dates below.

Reckendorfer did not simply buy Lipman's patent and sit on it. He patented his own improvement on November 4, 1862, an enlarged, recessed head designed to hold the eraser without making the pencil bulky, and reissued that patent on March 1, 1872. Lipman's original 1858 patent was separately extended for seven years from March 30, 1872. By the time Reckendorfer sued, two overlapping patents, Lipman's original and his own improvement, were both in play, and both would go down together.

Two Supreme Court rulings, two years apart

Blair's friction-fit patent reached the Supreme Court first, as Rubber-Tip Pencil Co. v. Howard, 87 U.S. 498, decided in 1874. Chief Justice Waite's opinion drew a line that would matter again a year later: an idea is not patentable by itself, only a truly new device for carrying it out. Since everyone already understood that stretched rubber grips whatever is pushed inside it, Blair's "invention" added nothing new to that known property. The Court's own words were blunt: the patentee "took nothing by his patent."

Reckendorfer's case, over Lipman's glued-in-groove design, followed in 1875 as Reckendorfer v. Faber, 92 U.S. 347. Eberhard Faber's pencil company was the defendant, and a lower circuit court had already found in 1874 that Faber's own product did not even infringe, because Faber attached its erasers with a paper tube rather than Lipman's carved wood groove, a distinctly different construction. The Supreme Court went further and struck down the patents outright, ruling that Lipman and Reckendorfer had merely placed two already-known tools, a pencil and an eraser, on one handle. The Court's reasoning turned on the difference between a combination and an aggregation: a patentable combination requires parts that "produce a different force or effect" working together than they would separately. "When the lead is used," the opinion states, "it performs the same operation...as it would do if there were no rubber at the other end;" each part "continues to perform its own duty, and nothing else." Convenience was not enough.

Where the records disagree

Several popular retellings of this story misidentify the defendant. At least one widely cited account describes the 1875 case as brought against "a German firm, Faber-Castell." That name did not exist yet. The German Faber pencil dynasty did not adopt "Faber-Castell" until 1898, when Ottilie "Tilly" von Faber married Count Alexander zu Castell-Rüdenhausen, twenty-three years after the Supreme Court decided Reckendorfer v. Faber. The actual defendant was the Eberhard Faber Pencil Company of New York, an American business founded in 1861 by Eberhard Faber (also recorded as John Eberhard Faber), whose father's family made pencils in Bavaria but who built his own, separate company after emigrating. Eberhard Faber's company and the German A.W. Faber firm that later became Faber-Castell were related branches of the same pencil-making family, not the same company, and in 1875 neither one carried the Faber-Castell name.

The company that built the fix

Eberhard Faber opened its first American pencil factory at the foot of East 42nd Street in Manhattan in 1861. A fire destroyed that plant in 1872, and the company rebuilt across the East River in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, a complex later designated a New York City historic district in 2007 for its German Renaissance Revival brickwork and its carved star-and-diamond motif.

Sixteen years after winning the Reckendorfer lawsuit, the company patented its own answer to the problem Lipman and Blair had both tried and failed to solve durably. US Patent 457,579, filed March 26, 1891, and granted that August to an Eberhard Faber of West New Brighton, New York, describes securing a rubber eraser with "a narrow metallic band surrounding the junction of the two and having peripheral grooves or indentations," with adhesive flowing into the grooves to lock the bond. The patent's own text states plainly what problem it solved: erasers had been falling out of screw-threaded metal tubes and out of deteriorating paper holders. This grooved metal band, not Lipman's carved wood groove or Blair's friction-fit hole, is the direct ancestor of the ferrule on a modern pencil. The founder, who had been sued over the earlier design, died in 1879; by 1891 the company was run by his son, who continued doing business under the same Eberhard Faber name.

The ferrule construction itself kept improving long after any of these patents expired. US Patent 3,344,464, filed in 1964 by Joseph B. Ostrowski and assigned to Olin Corporation, added fine longitudinal serrations to an aluminum ferrule, nearly doubling its resistance to crushing, from 41.6 pounds of force to 84.4, and making cheap aluminum a practical substitute for the heavier brass ferrules used until then. That serrated aluminum band is still the construction on most pencils sold today.

How to tell a real one

• No metal band at the eraser at all, with the rubber either glued directly into a carved wood groove or held by a wrapped paper tube, points to a construction from before the 1891 ferrule patent, not after.
• A narrow metal band with visible grooves or indentations under the eraser, with a thin line of dried adhesive visible at the seam, matches Eberhard Faber's 1891 ferrule design.
• A smooth, dent-prone ferrule with no surface ridges is more likely brass, or an unserrated aluminum band from before 1964; brass survives rough handling far better than plain aluminum does.
• Fine parallel ridges running the length of the ferrule are Ostrowski's 1964 serration pattern, now the standard on mass-produced pencils; their presence alone rules out a true 19th-century eraser attachment.
• A maker's name stamped on the ferrule or barrel narrows the maker but says nothing about the attachment method by itself; check the construction, not just the stamp.

The look-alikes

A separate rubber eraser cap, slipped loosely over the end of an unmarked pencil with no ferrule or adhesive bond at all, is a novelty or a classroom accessory, not a period attachment of any kind described in this guide; none of the four constructions above relies on a cap that simply slides on and off. Eberhard Faber's own Pink Pearl eraser, still sold today, is frequently confused with this story because it carries the Faber name, but it is a separate, standalone eraser product with no connection to the 1891 ferrule patent or the 1875 lawsuit. Modern pencils carrying Dixon Ticonderoga's specific yellow barrel against a bright metal ferrule, banded in green and yellow, are protected trade dress under federal registration 226,182, first used in 1925 and registered in 1927; a pencil copying that exact color combination under a different name is a trademark issue, not evidence of an older or rarer construction.

What they sell for

No confirmed auction-house realized price could be found for a period 19th-century combination pencil built to either the Lipman or the Blair patent; the object does not appear to circulate as its own identified collecting category today. The closest active market is in later, unrelated Eberhard Faber eraser products: boxed lots of vintage Eberhard Faber "Ruby" and "Pink Pearl" pencil erasers, unopened or lightly used, ask in the range of $19 to $20 on eBay. Those figures describe a 20th-century Eberhard Faber product traded today, not the 19th-century patent-era object this guide is about, and are included only as the nearest adjacent market reference.

Hunting an early combination pencil, a boxed set of vintage Eberhard Faber erasers, or anything else from the writing-desk shelf to check against this guide?

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Lewis Waterman's own fountain-pen patent predates his company's founding story by the same kind of gap; see Owl and Twig's guide to Waterman's patent. For another invention whose founding patent has nothing to do with the finished product collectors chase, see the guide to Crayola's 1891 patent. See more Field Guides