The Pencil Sharpener

Personal Selection:

As a design student, I use a lot of pencils and I need a good pencil sharpener to keep them pointy. Knowing how sharpeners are designed is very important to me because I use them so much.

History:

The first pencils were developed around 500 years ago, however they did not come with sharpeners. Instead, people sharpened their pencils with knives. In 1828 Bernard Lassimone decided that he could take advantage of this by creating the world’s first pencil sharpener. His sharpener, however, was no more efficient than just using a knife. The modern pencil sharpener didn’t appear until 1847 when Therry des Estwaux created a conical sharpener. The next major change to the pencil sharpener came with the development of the A.B. Dick Planetary Pencil Pointer. It used two rotating grinders to sharpen the pencil instead of a flat blade. This design evolved into the classic classroom crank sharpener as well as the basis of most electric sharpeners. However, Estwaux’s design is still far more popular for hand held sharpeners.

Function:

The job of a pencil sharpener is simple: to sharpen a pencil. A good sharpener gets the pencil to a sharp point without breaking the tip. Sometimes pencil sharpeners will collect the pencil shavings as well.

User:

Anyone who uses a pencil uses a pencil sharpener, so just about everyone.

Materials and Production:

The simplest pencil sharpener has only a metal blade and a plastic or metal frame. For more complicated designs the blade remains metal but the frame is almost always plastic.

Affordance:

Almost all pencil sharpeners have some way to simply show how to use them. The conical shape of the hole indicates to the user where to put the pencil, and grips or cranks show how the sharpener works.

Works Cited

Blitz, Matt. “The Invention of the Pencil Sharpener.” Today I Found Out. N.p., 28 Jan. 2015. Web.