Pencil sharpener
[5] Pencil sharpener devices using his patent were actually produced and sold by Binant, a shop for painting accessories in Paris.
[3] In 1833 in England, Cooper & Eckstein patented the so-called Styloxynon, a simple device consisting of two sharp files set together at right angle in a small block of rosewood.
[8] In the 1830s and 1840s, some French people, all based in Paris, were engaged in construction of simple pencil sharpening tools, like François Joseph Lahausse.
In 1847, the French nobleman Thierry des Estivaux invented a simple hand-held pencil sharpener in its recognizable modern form.
[13] At the end of the 19th century, especially in the United States, pencil sharpeners with various mechanisms had been developed and put on the market.
[15] In the next few decades, APSCO became the largest pencil sharpening machine producer in the world and together with a few other US companies, it dominated the market.
[16] In May 2011, tourism officials in Logan, Ohio put on display, in its regional welcome center, hundreds of pencil sharpeners which had been collected by Rev.
Johnson, a World War II veteran, had kept his collection of more than 3,400 sharpeners in a small shed, outside his home in Carbon Hill in southeast Ohio.
He had started collecting after his wife gave him a few pencil sharpeners as a gift in the late 1980s and kept them organized into categories, including cats, Christmas, and Disneyland.
The simplest common variety is a small rectangular prism or block, only about 1 × 5/8 × 7/16 inch (2.5 × 1.7 × 1.1 cm) in size.
Another important feature is a larger clearance hole at the end of the cone allowing sections of the pencil lead which break away to be removed with only minor inconvenience.
A larger, stationary planetary sharpener can be mounted on a desk or wall and powered by a hand crank.
The multiple cutting edges quickly sharpen the pencil, with a more precise finish than a single-blade device[citation needed].
Most planetary sharpeners have a large opening, with a rotatable guide disk in front of it that has multiple holes of different sizes, to accommodate pencils of many different diameters.
[citation needed] Some older models like the 1897 German Jupiter 1 used reversible rotary cutter-disks with cutting edges radiating from the center on each side.
In basic automatic pencil sharpeners, the lead may become too long and break, and so users must be careful to supervise the operation.
Specialized sharpeners are available that operate on non-standard sizes of pencil-shaped markers, such as wax crayons used in primary schools.
