The French painter and army officer Nicolas-Jacques Conte patented the process to make pencils in 1795, but it was another Frenchman, Bernard Lassimone, a mathematician, who filed the first patent for a pencil sharpener, in 1828. Up until that point pencils were sharpened using a penknife, which itself derived its name from its use in sharpening quills into pens.
it was not until 1847, however, that the pencil sharpener really took off in its modern form, and this was with the invention of a new sharpener by Therry des Estwaux. Perhaps, though, the most significant advance in pencil sharpener design was that by the African-American inventor John Lee Love. He designed the portable pencil sharpener, known as the Love Sharpener, which remains in wide use today, especially by artists. The pencil is placed in the ... -opening of the sharpener and rotated by hand, with the shavings being collected in a compartment that can then be emptied. Love patented his original design on November 23, 1897, in the United States, submitting a detailed drawing. He later explained that although his patent drawing depicted a plain, utilitarian device, he also envisaged it as highly decorated, to the extent that it could be used as a desk ornament or paperweight.
The first electric pencil sharpener is often attributed to the industrial designer Raymond Loewy in the early 1940s, and sold through the Hammacher Schlemmer Company of New York.
