Collector's Item Historic 19th Century English Knife Cleaner

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A fabulous kitchen accessory, a rare Kent's London, England knife cleaner dated 1865-70 with original porcelain label. An amazing historical … Read more A fabulous kitchen accessory, a rare Kent's London, England knife cleaner dated 1865-70 with original porcelain label. An amazing historical piece invented and patented by George Kent. It was his claim to fame and his most prominent piece of Collector's Item Historic 19th Century English Knife Cleaner In Good Condition For Sale In Hopewell, NJ

The knife cleaner is a wooden drum set vertically on cast iron base with four feet, each with a hole for a nail for mounting to tabletop, a hand crank and four slots in top of drum for inserting knives for cleaning. In order to use the machine, a person would insert knives into slots on the top of the wooden drum, pour Kent's emery powder into the drum's chute, and crank the winch handle to start the cleaning process. Inside the machine, wooden discs covered with alternate rows of bristles and strips of leather would turn and rub against both sides of the knives. The emery powder polished the steel cutlery as it passed through the wooden discs. By the end of the nineteenth century, Kent's patented rotary knife-cleaning machines were used in British colonies, the Americas, had won international exhibition prize medals, and had sold over 100,000 machines.
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