U.S. Patent No. 1,130,108 was granted to Helen Blanchard for a pencil-sharpening machine, one of her last known patents.
On March 16, 1915, Helen A. Blanchard was granted U.S. Patent No. 1,130,108 for a 'pencil-sharpening machine,' representing one of the final patents in her extraordinarily long and diverse inventive career, granted when she was 74 years old.
This invention marks a striking departure from the sewing machinery and industrial textile equipment that had defined most of her earlier career. It illustrates that Blanchard's inventive curiosity never waned, even in old age, and that she continued to identify everyday mechanical problems worth solving well into the twentieth century, decades after her first patent in the 1870s.
The pencil sharpener patent is historically significant as a bookend to a career encompassing at least 28 patents over more than four decades—from 1873 to 1915—an astonishing span of sustained inventive productivity matched by few inventors of either gender in this period. It demonstrates the sheer diversity of her engineering interests, spanning sewing machines, surgical instruments, and simple household office tools.
Coming just a year before the stroke that would end her active inventing career in 1916, this patent stands as one of the last testaments to Blanchard's lifelong commitment to mechanical innovation, an commitment that began when she was in her early thirties supporting her family and continued into her mid-seventies.