Or to give the original title for the Austrian patent granted in 1911; “Sicherheitsvorrichtung für Rasiermesser”. A more direct translation would be “Safety contraption for shaving knife”.
The original approach – as exemplified by the 1762 Perrett’s safety razor – was to place a guard on a straight razor. The idea were only slightly changed in the guise of Paul Zammet’s Improved Razor Guard. And in 1911 Thomas Claude Durham made another incremental improvement. Well, that and a bit more.
The intention with the patent was to come up with a safety guard that could not accidentally be pulled of the razor. This was done, according to the patent, by having a safety device that required a large amount of force to dismount.
The device took the form of a guard bar, that would act in much the same way as the guard on a regular safety razor.
Equally interesting is the device shown in figure 2 on the drawing; the device mounted on a shavette that Durham also patented. It used a slotted blade held in place with a sliding, dovetailed cap. Overall the shavette seems well though out and reasonable easy to manufacture. As shown in the patent, it had it’s own built in comb guard.
![](https://wegianwetshaving.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/AT_46156_B-714x1024.png)
Both patents by Thomas Claude Durham can be read on Espace.net with machine translated copies on Google Patents.
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