A seemingly bright idea that I stumbled over as I was clicking through the Mechanix Illustrated archives; the Rally Dry Shaver was a lawn mower for your five o’clock shadow. It folded up to sit in your pocket, and worked by simply running it over your face.

According to the advertisements, the Rally was the easiest, most painless, easiest to use shaver ever invented. Reality was probably less rosy.

A quick search via Google shows that quite a few of these are still around, and looking to be in good shape too. That alone makes me think they were less useful than the advertisements claimed – if the Rally had worked properly, they would have seen a lot more use.

All in all an interesting, but pointless, gizmo.

My book – “70 razor and shaving patents” – is now finally available for both Kindle and paperback!

To those of you who preordered the Kindle version; thank you, each and every one of you.
For all those in the online wet shaving community who encouraged me to get into the hobby, to stay with it, to learn about the history of traditional wetshaving, and for the welcoming friendship you all have shown; thank you, thank you, thank you – without you this book would never have seen the light of day.

The key to making a profit is – broadly speaking – to spend as little as possible on manufacture, while selling for as much as the market will pay. Thus the race for an inexpensive safety razor was on quite early, as can be seen in this patent, filed by Percy R Greist and Emanuel J Boyler in 1913, on behalf of the Greist Manufacturing Company.
As the inventors stated in the patent text, the whole idea was to make it cheap and convenient:

This invention relates to safety razors, and has for its object to provide a razor of this class which may be made at little cost, in that the parts thereof may be stamped from sheet metal, which is efficient in use, and the parts of which may be quickly and conveniently assembled and may be readily taken apart for cleaning.

The two main parts of the razor is stamped and folded in a press, and the springiness of the sheet metal act to hold the parts together. The top cap – for lack of a better term – is integral to the handle, and the base plate doubles as a blade holder and take down button. As far as the actual blade goes, there is no drawing of it by itself in the patent, but it looks to be much like a EverReady blade without a spine. It was inserted into the blade holder from the back when the razor was disassembled.

It is interesting to note, by the way, that this is one of the patents cited by Oneblade Inc¹ – that is; Tod Barrett, Porter Stansberry, and Mark Prommel  – for their reasonable successful OneBlade razor.

1) See US20160288349A1 and US10538005B2, both filed in 2016

Ralph E Thompson was – as we’ve already seen – a rather prolific inventor of safety razors and associated gear, and he seems to have been one of the central characters in Gillette’s search for an improved, adjustable razor in the early 1930’s. As the preamble for the patent puts it:

This invention relates to safety razors, and more particularly to means for so adjusting  the razor and blade as to vary the blade edge exposure thereof. Some beards require a considerable exposure of the blade edge if a satisfactory shave is to be secured while other beards require a much less exposure. The ideas of different people vary to a great extent in this matter and, furthermore, the same person may at one time desire a close shave and. at another time a rather rough shave.

So far so good; people have different ideas of how aggressive a razor should be, and people’s needs vary from day to day. Obvious for us today, who have grown up with adjustable razors, but in the context of the time it was perhaps less so. How Mr Thompson made the razor adjustable was very different than the methods we’re used today, and when adjusted it gave the shaver an aggressive and a mild edge to shave with.. useful, perhaps, in that you could do the first pass with one side and touch ups with the second.

In accordance with my invention, I so mount and preferably pivot a stud I to the cap that movement thereof causes such a relative transverse adjustment between the blade and guard as to. secure the said variations in blade exposure, the handle being adapted to cooperate with the stud to clamp the parts in the adjusted positions.
In the accompanying drawings I have illustrated certain specific embodiments of my invention but it, will be understood that the invention can be otherwise embodied and that the drawings are not to be construed as defining or limiting the scope of the invention.

So by tilting the base plate and cap in relation to the handle, the blade gap and blade exposure could be adjusted – as can be seen in figures 4 and 6 on the drawing. A potential improvement to Mr Thompson’s invention might be to flatten the very top of the cams (labelled as #32 in the drawings) slightly, so that the neutral position could easily be found.

The patents is – naturally – long since expired, and thus available if any daring razor manufacturer wishes to market out a truly unique, infinity variable adjustable razor that gives you a mild and aggressive shave at the same time.