PS: The Kindle edition of my book 70 razor and shaving patents is available for preorder at getbook.at/70razor_shavingpatents
Monthly Archives: March 2020
Kindle edition of “70 razor and shaving patents” available for preorder
Today is a big day for me; today is the day that the kindle edition of my book 70 razor and shaving patents became available for preorder!
You can preorder it at http://getbook.at/70razor_shavingpatents – feel free to share to link to anyone interested. The official release date is March 15th 2020, and it will also be available in paperback.
New and useful Improvements in Safety-Razor-Blade Packages,
If your freshly invented razor relies on replaceable blades, you better come up with a way to pack the blades. And that goes double if your blades isn’t perfectly flat, such as the blades for the GEM and EverReady razors.
Enter Joseph Kaufman – of the American Safety Razor Corp – and the patent he filed in January 1907 for how to package a single edge razor blade with a spine. In hindsight the invention is obvious, but it was novel enough in 1907 to be granted a patent. In the words of the patent:
The combination with a safety razor blade having longitudinal shoulders, of a paper slip of much greater length than width and open at the top and having closed ends, the blade being inserted into the slip. the shoulders of the blade resting on the upper edges of the slip and the cutting edge of the blade being a short distance inward from the bottom edge of the slip, and an envelop surrounding the blade and slip, and a retaining and sealing band surrounding the envelop, substantially as set forth.
So in short; a paper wrap around the blade – making the blade as wide as the spine and protecting the edge – and a paper envelope around that.
I got some new-old-stock Radio Steel EverReady blades – inherited from a friend of the family as part of a EverReady 1914 kit – and those blades are packet exactly as the patent describes. And when I bought modern GEM blades loose – that is, not in a dispenser – they had the card-stock wrapper around the blade proper.
Shave of the day 4th March
March 15th 2020…
Square blade ends
We might not think about it today, but those of us who uses vintage razors dating to before the mid 1930’s are actually using them with a blade they were not designed for – but the blade we’re using was designed to be compatible with them. And while the blade shown in this advertisement that ran in the June 1930 edition of Scientific American isn’t identical to the blade we know and love, it’s more than halfway there… Gillette just needed a lawsuit and a messy corporate merger with the American Safety Razor Company to get all the way there.
As an aside, this blade is probably the one covered by US patent US1850902A, filed in 1929. I might go into details on that at some point.