And now a page from our "Sunday Morning" Almanac: March 30th, 1858, 156 years ago today . . . the day a Philadelphia inventor made his mark. For that was the day Hyman Lipman patented the first pencil ...

Philadelphia inventor Hymen L. Lipman rushed heroically to the aid of mistake-prone schoolchildren, draftsmen and artists everywhere when he secured the patent for the pencil with eraser on this day ...

A pencil eraser (Alexis Madrigal). It's true, as Arthur C. Clarke said, that the most advanced technologies are indistinguishable from magic. It's not true, however, that the world's most magical ...