Friday / Weekend Open Lines


Friday, March 25th. The fact that pencils have erasers is supposed to indicate that no one is perfect. But it’s doubtful that people were perfect before this month in 1858. That’s when Hyman Lipman was granted a patent for a pencil with an incorporated rubber eraser. Lipman’s eraser could be sharpened, as it protruded from the wood sheath at the end opposite the graphite. The familiar wood-encased pencil dates back to 1662, when they were mass-produced in Nuremberg, Germany. More than 350 years on, and despite all of our electronic marvels, more than 14 billion pencils are produced globally every year. U.S. annual production is around 2 billion, and annual sales of pencils and art supplies comes to around $1.5 billion. You can find more facts about America’s people, places and economy, from the American Community Survey, at <www.census.gov>.

Saturday, March 26th. Everyone who loves convenience in shopping can thank Edward Delk and J.C. Nichols. It was they who conceived, designed, and built the first shopping mall in the U.S. The Country Club Plaza, on the outskirts of Kansas City, opened this month in 1923 to wide acclaim. It was the first shopping area to have stores facing inward toward a promenade, rather than facing out toward a road. The mall had 150 stores, a 2,000-seat auditorium, and parking for 5,500 cars. Today, the Country Club Plaza is still in business — along with nearly 110,000 other purpose-built shopping centers, where Americans ring up much of the nation’s more than $4.2 trillion in retail sales annually. You can find current data on the country’s economy by downloading the ‘America’s Economy’ mobile application at <www.census.gov/mobile>.

Sunday, March 27th. A triumph of mobile computing was achieved on this date in 1961. A division of the Sperry Rand Corporation equipped a trailer truck to haul a UNIVAC I computer from New York City down to North Carolina to process data for the Douglas Aircraft Corporation. The UNIVAC I, fully assembled, weighed in at a nimble 7,237 pounds. In 2013, nearly 84 percent of America’s 116 million households had computers. Even the country’s seniors participate heavily. Nearly two-thirds of senior households have computers, and 58 percent access the Internet. In marked contrast to the unwieldy UNIVAC of 1961, over 45 percent of Americans over the age of 25 are using smartphones for true mobile computing. Profile America is in its19th year as a public service of the U.S. Census Bureau.