The history of the pencil sharpener begins in France, where the modern pencil was invented in 1795 by Frenchman Nicolas-Jacques Conté. The invention of the hand held pencil sharpener was first credited to Parisian C.A. Boucher in 1822, and in 1828 French mathematician Bernard Lassimore took out the world’s first pencil sharpener patent. In 1847, French nobleman Thierry des Estivaux invented the hand-held pencil sharpener in its modern form. The first American pencil sharpener patent was taken out in 1855 by Walter K. Foster in Bangor, Maine, and in 1897 the Massachusetts-based African-American carpenter and inventor John Lee Love patented the portable pencil sharpener nicknamed the “Love Sharpener.” The electric pencil sharpener is said to have been first produced in 1917 and became widely available in the 1940s.