The human mind can be an overboiling pot of fantastical ideas, letting us come up with all sorts of brilliant and bizarre inventions. King Gillette’s double edged blade was arguable one of the former. Malcolm H Baker and Franklin S Frisbie’s hexagonal blade probably belongs in the later category…

The idea behind the invention was admirable;

It is the object of the present invention to roduce a razor of the safety type in which the blades by the use of a plurality of cutting edges shall have increased life-in other words, a’ razor in which the blades require resharpening or replacing at longer intervals than in devices at present in use.

Blades for the Gillette razors were not – comparatively speaking – nearly as cheap as they are today, and older style safety razors used wedge blades that required tools and skill to hone and sharpen. However… the leap of logic seems to have been that if two edges are good, then more edges must be better. Minor issues like practicality and useability seems to have taken a back seat to having many edges on the blade.

The result is less of a safety razor of the hoe-type and more of a shavette:

A further object is to provide a razor in which the cutting edge in use is in a parallel lane with the handle, and thus to provide or a drawing stroke in shaving, of the same the as is employed in the ordinary old style folding-blade razor.

And finally, they claimed that their new, improved razor also were:

…of few and simple parts, which may be easily taken apart or assembled and which is readily cleansed after use.