Founded | 1930 |
---|---|
Founder | Sundel Doniger |
Headquarters | Westerville, Ohio, United States |
Products | Utility knives, office supplies |
Parent | Elmer's Products, Inc. |
Website | http://www.xacto.com |
X-Acto is a brand name for a variety of cutting tools and office products owned by Elmer's Products, Inc. These include hobby and utility knives, saws, carving tools and many small-scale precision knives used for crafts and other applications. An X-Acto knife may be called an Exacto knife, utility knife, precision knife, or hobby knife.
The original knife was invented in the 1930s by Sundel Doniger, a Jewish Polish immigrant to the United States. He started a medical supply company in 1917 producing medical syringes and scalpels with removable blades. [1] This would later be his inspiration for the X-Acto brand of knives. [2] [3] He had planned to sell it to surgeons as a scalpel but it was not acceptable, because it could not be cleaned. His brother-in-law, Daniel Glück (father of poet and 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate Louise Glück), suggested that it might be a good craft tool.
In 1930, a house designer asked Doniger if he could create something for him that would help him crop some advertisements, Doniger agreed and created what is now known as the X-Acto Knife. [2]
An X-Acto knife is a blade mounted on a pen-like aluminum body. A knurled collar loosens and tightens an aluminum collet with one slot, which holds a replaceable blade.
There are numerous other knives on the market with very similar designs. Blades are typically interchangeable between different brands.
X-Acto knives are generally used for crafting and hobbies, such as modelmaking.
Before the availability of desktop publishing tools, preparing copy for use in printing (literal cut and paste or paste up) depended heavily on the use of knives like the X-Acto for trimming and manipulating slips of paper.
In addition to knives, blades, and tools, X-Acto produces office supplies including pencil sharpeners, paper trimmers, staplers, and hole punchers. X-Acto sharpeners are electric, battery, or manual. X-Acto has three types of trimmers: razor, rotary, and guillotine.
Through 2012, the company sold ceramic and convection space heaters and fans under the Boston brand name. [4]
The use of the X-Acto knife gained notoriety in Canada in May 2012 as it was used by Luka Magnotta who killed and dismembered Lin Jun in an Montreal apartment. During the trial in 2014, the knives were recovered but it is possible the X-Acto knives could be definitively linked to the murder. [5] [6]
A utility knife is any type of knife used for general manual work purposes. Such knives were originally fixed-blade knives with durable cutting edges suitable for rough work such as cutting cordage, cutting/scraping hides, butchering animals, cleaning fish scales, reshaping timber, and other tasks. Craft knives are small utility knives used as precision-oriented tools for finer, more delicate tasks such as carving and papercutting.
A knife is a tool or weapon with a cutting edge or blade, usually attached to a handle or hilt. One of the earliest tools used by humanity, knives appeared at least 2.5 million years ago, as evidenced by the Oldowan tools. Originally made of wood, bone, and stone, over the centuries, in step with improvements in both metallurgy and manufacturing, knife blades have been made from copper, bronze, iron, steel, ceramic, and titanium. Most modern knives have either fixed or folding blades; blade patterns and styles vary by maker and country of origin.
A scalpel, lancet, or bistoury is a small and extremely sharp bladed instrument used for surgery, anatomical dissection, podiatry and various handicrafts. A lancet is a double-edged scalpel.
A blade is the sharp, cutting portion of a tool, weapon, or machine, specifically designed to puncture, chop, slice, or scrape surfaces or materials. Blades are typically made from materials that are harder than those they are intended to cut. This includes early examples made from flaked stones like flint or obsidian, evolving through the ages into metal forms like copper, bronze, and iron, and culminating in modern versions made from steel or ceramics. Serving as one of humanity's oldest tools, blades continue to have wide-ranging applications, including in combat, cooking, and various other everyday and specialized tasks.
Penknife, or pen knife, is a small folding knife. Today penknife is also the common British English term for both a pocketknife, which can have single or multiple blades, and for multi-tools, with additional tools incorporated into the design.
Dremel is a multinational brand of power tools, focusing on home improvement and hobby applications. Dremel is known primarily for its rotary tools, such as the Dremel 3000, 4000 and 8200 series, which are similar to the pneumatic die grinders used in the metalworking industry by tool or moldmakers. Dremel later expanded its product range and now produces butane tools, benchtop and hand-held saws and oscillating tools. The company was purchased by Robert Bosch GmbH in 1993, and is now a division of the Robert Bosch Tool Corporation.
A pocketknife is a knife with one or more blades that fold into the handle. They are also known as jackknives (jack-knife), folding knives, EDC knife, or may be referred to as a penknife, though a penknife may also be a specific kind of pocketknife. A typical blade length is 5 to 15 centimetres.
A kitchen knife is any knife that is intended to be used in food preparation. While much of this work can be accomplished with a few general-purpose knives – notably a large chef's knife, a tough cleaver, a small paring knife and some sort of serrated blade – there are also many specialized knives that are designed for specific tasks. Kitchen knives can be made from several different materials.
A tang or shank is the back portion of the blade component of a tool where it extends into stock material or connects to a handle – as on a knife, sword, spear, arrowhead, chisel, file, coulter, pike, scythe, screwdriver, etc. One can classify various tang designs by their appearance, by the manner in which they attach to a handle, and by their length in relation to the handle.
WÜSTHOF is a knife-maker based in Solingen, Germany. Family owned for seven generations, the company's main products are mid-priced to high-end kitchen knives for domestic and professional use. WÜSTHOF is one of the leading manufacturers of chef's knives.
Spyderco is an American cutlery company based in Golden, Colorado, producing knives and knife sharpeners. Spyderco pioneered many features that are now common in folding knives, including the pocket clip, serrations, and the opening hole. Spyderco has collaborated with 30 custom knife makers, athletes, and self-defense instructors for designs and innovated the usage of 20 different blade materials.
A glass knife is a knife with a blade made of glass, with a fracture line forming an extremely sharp cutting edge.
Sharpening stones, or whetstones, are used to sharpen the edges of steel tools such as knives through grinding and honing.
Sharpening is the process of creating or refining the edge joining two non-coplanar faces into a converging apex, thereby creating an edge of appropriate shape on a tool or implement designed for cutting. Sharpening is done by removing material on an implement with an abrasive substance harder than the material of the implement, followed sometimes by processes to polish/hone the sharp surface to increase smoothness.
A butcher knife or butcher's knife is a knife designed and used primarily for the butchering or dressing of animal carcasses.
OLFA Corporation is a Japanese manufacturer of utility knives, founded in 1956 in Osaka, Japan. The name is derived from the Japanese words oru and ha. The company is known for inventing the snap-off blade and the rotary cutter.
GLOBAL is a Japanese brand of kitchen knives and accessory tools owned and manufactured by the Yoshikin factory of Japan. The Yoshikin Factory is owned by the Watanabe family and located in Tsubame, Japan.
Elmer's Products, Inc. or simply Elmer's, is an American-based company that has a line of adhesive, craft, home repair, and office supply products. It is best known as the manufacturer of Elmer's Glue-All, a popular PVA-based synthetic glue, in addition to other brands including Krazy Glue, ProBond and CraftBond adhesives, and X-Acto cutting tools.
Knife sharpening is the process of making a knife or similar tool sharp by grinding against a hard, rough surface, typically a stone, or a flexible surface with hard particles, such as sandpaper. Additionally, a leather razor strop, or strop, is often used to straighten and polish an edge.
The history of school and office products brand Westcott dates back to 1872, when Henry Westcott, together with his two sons Charles and Frank Westcott, started manufacturing wooden furniture used by printers and trellis units in Seneca Falls, New York. The company expanded rapidly and became one of the largest manufacturers of desk and school rulers in the world. Throughout its history it remained in Westcott family hands until it was purchased by Acme Shear Co. in 1968, which later changed its name to Acme United Corporation.