Crayons

===A crayon is a stick of colored wax, charcoal, or chalk used for writing, coloring, drawing, and other methods of illustration. There are some crayons made of oily-chalk named oil-pastel. There is also a grease pencil, or china marker which is made out of colored grease that is useful for writing on hard and glossy objects.===

The two basic ingredients for a crayon are:

 * ===Pigment===
 * ===Paraffin wax, "alkane," hydrocarbons (CnH2n+2) stored in heated 17,000 gallon tanks.===

===The mixture is heated until it melts into a liquid. Crayons melt at 105 degrees Fahrenheit (40 degrees Celsius). The mixture is heated to 190 F (82 C). The liquid is poured into a preheated mold full of hundreds of crayon-shaped holes. Cool water (55 F, 13 C) is used to cool the mold, allowing the crayon to be made in 3 to 9 minutes.===

**__History__**
Edwin Binney and C. Harold Smith are cousins that invented crayons. The first box of eight Crayola crayons made in 1903 were sold for 10 cents and the colors were black, brown, blue, red, purple, orange, yellow, and green. The word Crayola was created by Alice Stead Binney (wife of Edwin Binney) who took the French words for chalk (craie) and oily (oleaginous) and combined them. Crayons are also fun to draw with.

The history of the crayon is not entirely clear. The word "crayon" is first recorded in Webster's Dictionary in 1644, coming from (chalk) and the Latin word //creta// (Earth). The notion to combine a form of wax with pigment actually goes back thousands of years. The Egyptians perfected a technique using hot beeswax combined with colored pigment to bind color into stone in a process known as encaustic painting. A heat source was then used to "burn in" and fix the image in place. This method, also employed by the Romans, the Greeks and even indigenous people in the Philippines around 1600-1800, is still used today. However, the process wasn’t used to make crayons into a form intended to be held and colored with and was therefore ineffective to use in a classroom or as crafts for More than 100 billion crayons have been produced so far. The first crayons consisted of a mixture of charcoal and oil. In the early 1900s, cousins Edwin Binney and Harold Smith developed a nontoxic wax crayon. Binney’s wife, Alice, attached the French word for chalk, craie, with “ola,” from oily, to form the [|Crayola] brand name. Their first box of Crayola crayons were sold for a nickel in 1903. The first Crayola crayons came in a box of eight colors: black, blue, brown, green, orange, purple, red and yellow. By 1957, 40 new colors were introduced. Today there are more than 120 crayon colours, including Atomic Tangerine, Blizzard Blue, Mango Tango, Outrageous Orange, Laser Lemon, Screamin’ Green and Shocking Pink. Over 5 billion crayons are produced each year. You can buy crayons in many different sized boxes. There have been additions to the colors of crayons over time.

See: [|History of crayons]

You can make a candle from a crayon! (wax)

Here are the items you'll need to complete the project. Most of these can easily be found around your house. **Materials:** Cotton String, Bottle Cap, Crayon, lighter or matches (to light the candle)