First invented in 1903, the original Crayola box contained only eight colors, including red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet, brown, and black. It sold for only a nickel.
A chart posted on Reddit shows how Crayola crayon colors have grown from eight basic hues to dozens in a little over 100 years.
Now, there are 120 colors in the Crayola color wheel. The names have evolved as well to include colors like “denim,” “screamin’ green,” “dandelion,” and “razzle dazzle rose.”
Stephen Von Worley, a visualization researcher at Data Pointed, created the visual crayon chronology with his pseudonymous friend who he calls “Velociraptor.” They used Wikipedia’s list of Crayola colors and added the standard 16-count crayon box released in 1935 for schools to create the beautiful graphic.
The pair also figured out that the average growth rate of crayon colors was 2.56 percent annually, meaning that the number of colors doubles every 28 years.
So by 2050, our future children could be coloring with 330 different colored crayons.
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Sadly the number of colors aren’t exactly accumulating. They “retired” sets of colors twice when they added new colors. Here’s the link to Crayola’s retired list:
http://www.crayola.com/faq/another-topic/what-are-the-names-of-the-retired-crayon-colors/
The place taken away by Raw Umber seems so empty now in the colorbow.