1828 10 year 10 20th, Bernard Lassimone, a mathematician in Paris, applied for and obtained the French patent number 2444 for the "tire crayon" invented by him. One year after the patent was granted, the "tail crayon" was advertised in the Constitution, an influential political and literary newspaper in Paris, and was regarded as the first choice for sharpening pencils. It uses two small metal files to tilt 90 degrees on a piece of wood, sharpening, scraping and grinding the wood on the pencil to make a nib. Although this is the first mechanical pencil sharpener, its speed is not much faster or less than using a knife.
About ten years later, 1837, the British began this wave of pencil sharpeners. Cooper and Eckstein's "Patent Pencil Pointer" first appeared in Mechanical Weekly, a scientific weekly founded and edited by Joseph Clinton Robertson. They named their invention "Styloxynon", and in the description, it is very close to La Simone's pencil sharpener. "Two sharp files are neatly and firmly arranged at right angles on a small piece of mahogany." In fact, in Mechanical Weekly, the author (probably Robertson, considering most of what he wrote in the magazine) said, "For personal convenience, I have my own experience in using this ingenious little instrument ... I am sure I will introduce it to many draftsmen through the media, so that they will notice that I will provide important services for all your readers.
Then, at the end of the page advertisement, it was written, "When the new pencil is used for the first time, it should be roughly pointed out with a knife before using the column ketone."
Needless to say, a better pencil sharpener than Styloxynon is still needed.
Ten years after Styloxynon, another Frenchman, The Therry des Estwaux, designed something that we still use on pencil sharpeners today. Estevo invented a cone-shaped device. When the pencil is inserted and twisted, all the edges of the pencil will be cut off immediately, making the sharpening process faster. Today, it is called prism sharpening. Since then, sharpeners with conical devices have appeared all over Europe, although its design is slightly different from that of Estwaux. They are also used in offices around the world. In fact, the documents traced by the early office museum show that new york bought an automatic pencil sharpener for their office from a British company as early as the winter of 1853, and the price of each pencil sharpener was one dollar and fifty cents (about 42 dollars today). With the increasing demand for pencil sharpeners, there is a growing demand for mass production to reduce the price.
Entering Walter K. Foster, according to various sources, he obtained the patent of the first pencil sharpener in the United States at 185 1, and improved the original conical design to make it easier for mass production. But after further research, we didn't find the patent of Walter Foster before 1855, but it was actually the patent of "Walter K Foster" (although it was a typographical error). This patent, American patent. No. 12722 is "improving the mold for casting pencil sharpener", which describes how to correctly create the mold for mass production of equipment.
1857, a report in a trade magazine said that due to "demand", Foster and his employees produced more than 50 pencil sharpeners (7,200) every day and exported them to European companies.