A pencil sharpener (also known as a pencil pointer or in Ireland as a parer or topper) is a tool for shaving away the worn surface of a pencil’s writing point. Pencil sharpeners can be manually operated or powered by electricity. Many pencil sharpeners have a casing around them that can be removed to dump the pencil shavings waste into a garbage container.

A pencil was sharpened by whittling it with a knife before the introduction of specialized pencil sharpeners.

Pencil sharpeners were first developed in France when a French book published in 1822 detailed an innovation by Mr. C. A. Boucher (Paris) for the building of a pencil sharpener. He was working with pantographs and required a mechanism to sharpen the pencils accurately. Mr. Boucher’s invention was technically sound and practical. His concept was also well-known and accepted on a global scale, as evidenced by comparable accounts in German literature at the time. Mr. Boucher, on the other hand, had not filed a patent application for his pencil sharpener. It’s doubtful that his innovations will be used commercially.

Bernard Lassimonne (Limoges), a French mathematician, petitioned for the world’s first patent (French patent #2444) on a pencil sharpener in 1828. Binance, a business in Paris that sells painting supplies, actually developed and marketed pencil-sharpening gadgets based on his invention. Cooper & Eckstein invented the Styloxynon in 1833 in England, a basic device consisting of two sharp files placed at right angles in a tiny block of rosewood. This is the oldest pencil sharpener known to have survived.

Some French individuals, all located in Paris, were engaged in the production of basic pencil-sharpening equipment in the 1830s and 1840s, including François Joseph Lahausse. These gadgets were sold in part, but not in a way that was significant beyond the region. Thierry des Estivaux, a French aristocrat, created a basic hand-held pencil sharpener in its current version in 1847. Walter Kittredge Foster of Bangor, Maine, invented the first American pencil sharpener in 1855. He started a firm ” the world’s first pencil sharpener company ” and mass-produced tiny hand-held pencil sharpeners in enormous quantities. Only a few years later, the sharpeners were rebranded as “American pencil sharpeners” and marketed throughout Europe.

Pencil sharpeners with diverse mechanics were invented and put on the market around the end of the nineteenth century, particularly in the United States. The majority of these gadgets were large and designed for use in workplaces. The Perfect Pencil Pointer (Goodell Co.), the GEM Pencil Sharpener (by Gould & Cook Co.), and the Planetary Pencil Sharpener (A. B. Dick Co.) are all examples from the United States, as is the Jupiter (Guhl & Harbeck Co.) from Germany. The business Automatic Pencil Sharpener Co. (APSCO) was formed at the turn of the twentieth century, and after 1907, it released the US Automatic Pencil Sharpener, which dominated in those years. Later versions, such as the Climax, Dexter, Wizard, and Junior, were available with milling mechanisms. APSCO became the world’s largest pencil sharpening machine manufacturer during the following few decades, dominating the market with a few other US firms.

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