JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

I came upon this interesting image in a wrist-bending/breaking volume of Scientific American, the 27 November 1869 issue (page 337), featuring something I never gave any thought to–a millstone sharpener. Once seen it makes perfect sense to me to keep the channels of the stone in good repair, and John Dickinson created this lovely apparatus to do just that, using industrial-grade diamonds on the grinding surface. The device won a medal in its presentation at the 1862 world’s fair in London, and appeared in ads from that year in the agricultural-world’s equivalent of the Scientific American, the American Agriculturalist.  The exact illustration was used a few years later in an article on Dickinson’s tool in The Manufacturer and Builder (volume 3, 1871, page 59), though this seems to have been a common practice, as I’ve noticed many times that SA reproduced foreign images without attribution.  In any event, it was a smart invention, though the clientelle for it sounded as though they needed a bit of a “sell” for the sale:

“Millers who may be unacquainted with the nature of diamonds or their durability, it is reasonable to suppose, will be somewhat skeptical and incredulous as to the practicability of using them successfully as an economical application in dressing the lands of millstones.”