Dandy Pencil Sharpener

Originally founded in New York on Broadway in 1905, the Automatic Pencil Sharpener Company promoted its first product, the U.S. Automatic Pencil Sharpener—a hand-cranked, fearsome-looking beast with three rotating blades. Late in 1911, Charles C. Spengler and Edwin C. Loomis of the Spengler-Loomis Manufacturing Company bought the Automatic Pencil Sharpener Company and moved it to Chicago. In 1913, a new factory space was commissioned in Spengler’s adopted hometown of Rockford, whereas the corporate headquarters, meanwhile, remained in Chicago. The Hartford factory, completed in 1914, covered 26,000 square feet, with upwards of 150 employees soon working to produce half a million pencil sharpeners per year.

By the early 1920s, there were more than a dozen other APSCO models being produced, including the “Gem,” “Dexter” (named for Loomis’s son), “Wizard,” “Junior,”,“Dandy (this is the model on display)," and one questionable named model called the “Ideal-Dandy Climax”. Most of these models had two replaceable milling cutters of tool steel and a detachable metallic or transparent chip casing and $1.00 price tag. With demand for the Chicago sharpener on the rise, the company experienced the first of many labor disputes with its growing workforce. In 1916, a riot at the factory involving the workers took place where twenty-two arrests were made.

World War I was underway, and much of the production at the factory was shifted into government contract work. This included trunk hardware, stamping tools, sugar dispensers, and a line of stove-top ovens. When the war ended the company took legal action against competitors like the Stewart Manufacturing Company over subtle pencil sharpener design elements. The Automatic Pencil Sharpener Company would remain an industrial pillar in Rockford for another 60 years, surviving the Great Depression, another world war, and the demise of the Spengler-Loomis MManufacturing Company some time in the 1950s. It would carry on under the ownership of Maple Industries in the 1960s and Berol Corp. (formerly the Eagle Pencil Co.) in the ‘70s and ‘80s.