Click on the following images for an enlarged version. Use your Back button to return here. While a handful of mechanical pencil sharpeners were patented in the U.S. between 1860 and 1880, scores of machines were introduced between 1884 and 1915. During this three-decade period, commercially successful mechanical sharpeners embodied a wide variety of approaches to the central problems involved in sharpening a pencil, namely, to remove wood from the point and sharpen the lead, and either to rotate the pencil or to rotate the cutter around the pencil, all without breaking the lead. Antique mechanical pencil sharpeners can be divided into three categories based on the cutting medium or mechanism.
Some machines rely on abrading media such as sandpaper or a steel file.
Other machines use a steel milling cutter with multiple raised cutting edges. Yet other machines use from one to a dozen or more blades. When you turn the crank, both the sandpaper disk and the pencil rotate. Plate 3 shows the Perfect Pencil Pointer , which was patented in 1890 and sold until the mid-1910s. The Perfect uses a stationary steel file to sharpen the pencil.