Carpenters Sharpened Pencils With a Knife. John Lee Love Put the Blade in a Box.
Desk-mounted crank sharpeners existed by the 1890s, but they were furniture. A carpenter on a job site still carried a knife and shaved the point by hand. Love built one that fit in a pocket and caught the shavings.
US594114 was granted to John Lee Love on November 23, 1897, for a portable pencil sharpener. It is usually called the Love Sharpener.
Love was a Black inventor working as a carpenter in Fall River, Massachusetts. He held at least two patents, and the other one, for an improved plasterer's hawk, tells you the same thing about him: these are tools designed by someone who used tools all day.
Two kinds of sharpener
Mechanical pencil sharpeners existed before 1897. The good ones were large crank-operated machines bolted to a desk or a wall, with planetary cutters that produced an excellent point. Schools and offices had them.
That does no good on a job site. A carpenter marking cuts needs a sharp pencil constantly, and the standard method was to take out a pocket knife and whittle the point, which takes both hands, produces an uneven point, wastes pencil, and occasionally produces a cut finger.
Love's patent targets that gap. The device is small enough to carry, requires no mounting, and works with one hand: put the pencil in the conical opening and turn it against a fixed angled blade.
The shavings
The feature that separates his design from a bare blade is the receptacle. The sharpener captures the shavings inside the body instead of dropping them wherever the user is standing.
On a construction site that is a practical matter of not filling a client's floor with cedar curls. In an office it is the reason a sharpener can sit on a desk. Nearly every handheld sharpener sold since has the same arrangement: a blade over a tapered hole, and a sealed chamber underneath with a lid.
The mechanism is so simple that it has resisted improvement for more than a century. The plastic sharpener in a school pencil case is Love's design in a cheaper material.
What is recorded
Details of Love's life are sparse and the dates in circulation conflict with each other. He is generally recorded as born in North Carolina and working in Fall River, Massachusetts, and he died in 1931. Beyond that the documentation is thin, which is the usual situation for Black inventors of the period, whose lives were recorded in municipal directories rather than in newspapers.
The patent office kept his drawing.
See the original
The full text and figures of US594114 are on patents.us.
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