sharpener

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Sharpener with pencil

A sharpener or pencil sharpener , pencil sharpener (formerly also pencil sharpener ), often also called sharpener for short , is a mechanical device with which you can sharpen a pencil made of a lead and a wooden sheath . Usually these are pencils and colored pencils . Unlike in the English or French-speaking world, there are other terms in German for pencil sharpening devices that have a mechanism that supports the sharpening , namely pencil sharpening machine (less common pencil sharpening machine , formerly also pencil sharpening machine ) or, for short , sharpening machine .

history

Originally invented in the 17th century, pencils were sharpened with a knife. Feather knives , which were actually used to sharpen the quills and were everyday objects, were very often used .

With the increasing number of writing rooms at the beginning of the 19th century, the use of pencils also increased, whereby the time required to sharpen these pencils represented an economic loss. In view of the emerging industrialization , the need arose for a special tool for sharpening.

The development of pencil sharpeners began in France. In 1822, the invention of the Parisian CA Bocher for pencil sharpening devices was reported in France. He worked with pantographs and obviously needed a device to sharpen the pencils precisely. Mr. Boucher's device was technically sensible and functional. His idea was also known and recognized internationally, as corresponding reports in German literature at the time show. However, Boucher has not filed a patent for his pencil sharpener. Commercial use of his inventions is unlikely.

In 1828 the Frenchman Bernard Lassimone , Limoges, registered the world's first patent for a pencil sharpening device in France (Patent # 2444). This device was actually produced and sold by Binant, a painting supplies store in Paris. In 1833, Cooper & Eckstein in England patented a simple device in which two files were arranged perpendicular to each other in a block of wood. This device was sold under the name Styloxynon and has been preserved as the oldest pencil sharpener in rare cases up to the present day.

In the 1830s and 1840s, a number of French people, all based in Paris, were engaged in the construction of simple pencil sharpening devices, including François Joseph Lahausse. Some of these pencil sharpeners were sold, but had limited local significance. In 1847, the French Thierry des Estivaux invented a pencil sharpener that already corresponded to the shape of hand sharpeners in use today. However, there is no evidence that it was actually produced. Walter Kittredge Foster of Bangor , Maine applied for the first American patent for a pencil sharpener in 1855. It was a hand sharpener that consisted of a holder cast from low-melting point metal with a built-in small knife blade. Through effective casting technology, large numbers of such pencil sharpeners have been produced at very low prices. These spread very quickly in Europe and were z. B. already sold in Germany in 1857 as "American Pencil Sharpeners".

The inventor of the wood pulp for cheap paper production, Friedrich Gottlob Keller , registered the German Reich patent 27254 for a pencil sharpener in 1882 and added an additional patent to this in 1884 (DRP 29411). Both show the main features of the small handheld devices that are still common today. But Keller was not financially able to make many of his ideas economically viable himself.

In 1908, the designer Theodor Paul Möbius (1868–1953) invented the cone-shaped pencil sharpener in Erlangen . A whole branch of industry developed from this invention in Erlangen. The company of Paul Möbius himself, which at times employed up to 150 people, as well as Möbius & Ruppert KG, founded by his brother Alfred Möbius together with Heinrich Ruppert in 1922, and the KUM company founded by Adam Klebes together with Fritz Mußgüller in 1919, produced a total of around 200 per year Million sharpeners and in the mid-1980s they had an estimated 75% share of the world market. Möbius & Ruppert and KUM expanded their product ranges to include cosmetic sharpeners and drawing instruments. After his death, the inventor's company was transferred to a rescue company . Parts of the company archive are now kept in the Erlangen city archive. A selection of sharpeners is exhibited in the city museum.

Sharpening machine Avanti (PGH Dresden)

Also in 1908, the Dresden insurance agent Emil Grantzow (1860–1942) invented a “pen sharpener with a rotating star knife and incremental rotation of the pen holder”, later called the Avanti pencil sharpener for short . For this he acquired the German imperial patent in July of the same year. The Avanti was produced until the 1960s, most recently by the GDR company PGH Dresden (see picture!).

functionality

Using a sharpener

While pencils and colored pencils used to be sharpened with a knife , the wooden skin of the pencil is finely and evenly cut off in a sharpener using a sharp , narrow blade that is screwed to the housing and is up to two centimeters long. The pencil is rotated with one hand and the sharpener is held with the other. The mine is then tipped simultaneously.

species

There are two types: The small open sharpener (made of plastic , wood or metal ) and the one that has a container, usually made of plastic, for collecting the sharpening waste as an attachment. For thicker colored pencils, there is usually a second, larger pointed hole in the latter. Metal sharpeners are made of magnesium , zinc or aluminum ( housing ), steel ( blade ) and brass ( screw ). The magnesium acts as a sacrificial anode to protect the iron blade from rusting .

Pencil sharpeners are also sold as motifs, e.g. B. as a small globe, as a model gramophone , toy - car , etc.

For offices there are hand-cranked sharpeners and electrically driven pencil sharpeners. These usually had and still have a milling roller or a milling wheel rotating around the pin instead of the individual knife , which makes them much more durable. Special sharpeners for make-up pencils are available in drugstores .

criticism

The blade of a sharpener (with a conical pen holder and single blade) cuts the wood of the pen parallel to the direction of growth. If the blade is not perfectly sharp, this regularly leads to fraying of the wood and an unsatisfactory point. The blade can hardly be re-sharpened by an inexperienced user and must therefore be replaced by a new one, which is often not done due to negligence and lack of availability. Because often neither the Spitzer is centrally made perfect, nor the mine is always mounted centrally in the wood of the pen, there is often one-sided to short point. Against this background, some users still use the method of sharpening with a sharp knife in the longitudinal direction of the pen.

The sharpeners described and mostly used today deliver a round point due to the system . In some cases this is undesirable. For drawing fine lines, tips that are flat on both sides (wedge-shaped; chisel-shaped) have proven to be more advantageous, as such a tip is more resistant to breakage and wears out more slowly. This is done regularly when preparing a carpenter's pencil, for example . With a mechanical pencil in which the lead is used without a wooden cover, all that remains is to grip a strip of sandpaper; for wood-covered pencils, the knife is used again to expose the lead and then sharpen it.

Incidental

In a figurative sense, people who motivate or try to motivate other people or animals are also referred to as sharpeners.

More pictures

  • Sharpener with hand crank

  • Pencil sharpening machine "Jupiter 1" from Guhl & Harbeck Hamburg (around 1920)

  • AW Faber pencil sharpener

  • Razor sharpener

  • What happens in the sharpener

  • Freshly sharpened pencil

  • Battery operated sharpener

literature

  • Leonhard Dingwerth: Small pencil sharpener: History and description of historical pencil sharpeners , Verlag Kunstgrafik Dingwerth (April 4, 2008), ISBN 978-3921913376 .
  • David Rees: The art of sharpening a pencil: Theory and practice of the art of pencil sharpening for writers, artists, entrepreneurs, architects, craftsmen, lawyers, civil servants and many others. A practical and theoretical treatise . Metrolit Verlag, Berlin 2013. ISBN 978-3-8493-0045-6 .

Web links

Wiktionary: Sharpener  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations
Commons : Pencil Sharpener  - collection of images, videos, and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Recueil de la Société polytechnique: ou Recueil industriel, manufacturier, agricole et commercial, de la salubrité publique, et des actes de l'administration propres à encourager les diverse branches de l'économie publique . Société polytechnique, 1822, p. 290–295 ( google.de [accessed on March 2, 2019]).
  2. ↑ Julius A. Hülsse: General Machine Encyclopedia: A - Beu . Voss, 1841 ( google.de [accessed March 6, 2019]).
  3. ^ Description of the machines et procédés spécifiés dans les brevets d'invention, publ. par CP Molard. [With] Table générale des vingt premiers volumes. [Continued as] Description of the machines ... pour lesquels des brevets d'invention ont été pris sous le régime de la loi du 5 juillet 1844 . 1835, p. 583, 81–83 ( google.de [accessed on March 2, 2019]).
  4. ↑ Repertory of patent inventions and other discoveries and improvements in arts, manufactures and agriculture . Macintosh, 1833, pp. 318–319 ( google.de [accessed on March 2, 2019]).
  5. ^ Mechanic's Magazine, Museum, Register, Journal & Gazette . Knight and Lacey, 1837, pp. 185 ( google.de [accessed on March 2, 2019]).
  6. ^ Société d'encouragement pour l'industrie nationale: Bulletin de la Société d'encouragement pour l'industrie nationale . Société d'encouragement pour l'industrie nationale, 1834, p. 406–407 ( google.de [accessed March 2, 2019]).
  7. ^ Constant de Thierry des Estivaux, Marquis de Faletans - inventeur du taille-crayon »RUPERT WILLOUGHBY. Retrieved March 2, 2019 (American English).
  8. ↑ Latest news in the field of politics: 1858 . Wolf, 1858, p. 2623 ( google.de [accessed on March 2, 2019]).
  9. ^ Bianca Braun: Pencil sharpener industry . In: Christoph Friederich, Bertold Freiherr von Haller, Andreas Jakob (Hrsg.): Erlanger Stadtlexikon . W. Tümmels Verlag, Nuremberg 2002, ISBN 3-921590-89-2 ( complete edition online ).
  10. ↑ Patent-Infos.de: history of the pencil sharpener machine Avanti ; accessed on April 26, 2020
  11. ↑ spitzmaschine.de: Avanti No. 1, 1b and 2 ; accessed on April 26, 2020
  12. ↑ http://daten.didaktikchemie.uni-bayreuth.de/umat/magnesium/magnesium.htm