Pencil is the most common type of stationery in our daily lives. Since the 16th century, people have discovered that graphite can leave traces on paper. Through continuous improvement in formula and manufacturing technology, it has gradually formed the modern pencil that everyone uses in daily life. Since its birth, pencils have been popular due to their many advantages such as low price, easy portability, long handwriting retention time, and the ability to be altered. However, one problem is the need to frequently sharpen pencils. So the pencil sharpener became a companion stationery for pencils.
But do you know what kind of pencil sharpener the earliest people used? Let's take a look at what pencil sharpeners looked like 100 years ago, and what impact have they had on our current pencil sharpeners?
According to its principle, the pencil sharpener can be roughly divided into friction type (sharpening stone), cutting type and milling cutter type.
Friction type pencil sharpener
The friction type has the lowest efficiency, even worse than manual sharpening, and in fact, most of them are quickly eliminated.
Perfect Pencil Pointer is a pencil sharpener patented in 1890. Its design principle should come from the sharpening stone.
This pencil sharpener is commonly referred to as a donut. The wooden wheel is equipped with a limit hole for pencils, and the rod has a built-in gear control. After inserting the pencil into the limit hole, it rotates back and rubs the pen head on the file to complete the pencil sharpening work.
Gould&Book pencil sharpener was patented in 1886. The working principle of this pencil sharpener is to achieve the purpose of sharpening by rotating the handle to drive the grinding disc to rotate.
The entire pencil sharpener is driven by gears to rotate, so it is a semi-automatic pencil sharpener. The limiter of pencils can be adjusted and is suitable for pencils of different diameters. The flaw in its design is that it does not solve the problem of pencil shavings flying randomly, and after sharpening the pencil, it will be everywhere.
Subsequently, some improvements were made to the product, with a device for collecting debris added at the bottom.
Cutting type pencil sharpener
The principle of a cutting type pencil sharpener is to imitate the process of manually sharpening pencils, and its efficiency is slightly higher than that of a friction type pencil sharpener
Little Shaver Pencil Sharpener, this pencil sharpener was patented in 1904. The original design of this pencil sharpener was to imitate the action of humans sharpening pencils, but its drawback was that it had to rotate the pencil to change position every time it was sharpened. After unscrewing the screw, the blade can be replaced, but in fact, apart from using the lever principle to slightly save effort, it does not improve much efficiency.
Rockford Pencil Pointer, which can be used as a portable version of the previous pencil sharpener.
The working principle of this pencil sharpener is to use six blades installed on a metal plate. Turning the handle drives the metal plate to rotate, and the blades can complete the work of sharpening pencils.
Automatic Pencil Sharpener, patented in 1906, is said to be the best pencil sharpener sold in the 1980s. It is also the most famous and practical pencil sharpener of many different designs. Compared with the previous products, it uses three blades, and can rotate the pencil by shaking the handle at the same time. The small drawer at the bottom can also remove pencil shavings, which is quite close to the pencil sharpener used today.
