In 1925, a cabinetmaker from Lillehammer, Norway looked at a block of cheese and thought: there has to be a better way.
His name was Thor Bjørklund. He was a furniture maker by trade, a man whose working life was spent understanding timber, reading grain, and coaxing beautiful things from raw material with the right tool in the right hands. And it was that craftsman's eye that gave him an idea no one else had thought of.
A wood plane takes thin, precise shavings from a board. Why couldn't the same logic work on cheese?
The answer, it turned out, was that it absolutely could. Bjørklund filed his patent on 27 February 1925, and the ostehøvel — the cheese plane — was born. The original prototype was said to have been made from his wife's potato pot, cut apart and reformed into something entirely new. The original has since been lost, but the idea it represented has outlasted everything.
Why It Mattered
It's worth remembering the world Bjørklund was working in. Europe between the wars was not a place of abundance. Cheese was a household staple, but also something to be conserved. Bjørklund's plane took only what was necessary, a even and thin slice, consistent with nothing wasted. Not only did he no longer get any doorstops (you know that slice of cheese we've all cut that could hold a door open), but it was kinder to the household budget.
The Norwegian dairy industry didn't see it that way. They hung up signs urging people not to use their planes, worried the tool would reduce cheese consumption. They had it backwards. A tool that makes things last longer, that brings more pleasure from less, doesn't diminish the thing it's used on. It honours it.
From One Kitchen in Lillehammer to the World
Thor Bjørklund & Sønner AS was established as a company in 1927. That year alone, 40,000 planes were made, packed and shipped from two rooms in Bjørklund's home, with his wife Karen washing each one in their kitchen before it went out the door.
More than 60 million Bjørklund planes have since been sold worldwide. The tools are still made in Ringebu, in the Gudbrandsdal valley of Norway, not far from where Thor first picked up a carpenter's plane and had his idea.
That's what one maker, with one good idea, can do.
For the Woodturners Among Us
We stock a selection of Bjørklund pieces; cheese planes, graters, knives, cake lifts, salad sets and spreaders, and every one of them is designed specifically as a woodturning project, with a blank waiting for a custom-turned handle by you.
There's something fitting about that. A carpenter invented these tools. And now woodturners can complete them.
The best things really are made by makers. Thor Bjørklund knew it. If you're reading this, chances are you do too.