Are you sad that your vintage injector isn’t self-lathering? Does it bring you down that your old Schick isn’t stretching your skin? Fear not, John D Karle took time of from patenting surgical equipment and sewing machine gear to invent an attachment for your Schick injector! Well, a “safety razor of a well known type”, according to the patent.

So what were John trying to achieve? Let us have a look at his patent:

This invention relates to attachments for safety razors and it has for its principal object to provide a, moisture retaining pad disposed immediately in advance of the cutting edge of :the razor, whereby the shaving of the face may be accomplished more expeditiously and satisfactorily than heretofore.

From US patent 2,600,880

So… another day, another inventor trying to get us to apply moisturiser, lubricant, or lather just ahead of the razor blade You know… where it will have virtually no time to work on the skin or stubble. But apart from that there is little wrong with John’s idea.

The attachment consists of two main parts. A large, moisture retaining resilient pad. And a holder for said pad that will clip onto the semi-circular spring that Schicks of the era had under the razor head.

The holder has a spring clip similar to a pen clip. This would hold it against the spring on the razor. At the same time two little tabs would form shoulders that would stop the holder from slipping sideways. A retaining lip would interact with the guard on the razor so the holder would not slide up and down.

John suggest using sponge rubber for the pad itself. This would be cut to a uniform thickness, and the act of inserting it in the holder would create the rounded shape.

Overall, there is no reason why John’s attachment wouldn’t work. And by work, I do of course mean “attach to the razor”… There is no way a lubricating pad immediately in front of the cutting edge will do a shaver much good.

If you want to know more about John’s attachment, you can read the full patent at Google patents. If you want to read about more shaving patents and oddities, you can have a look at my older posts about those things.