An interesting thing about old patents – especially really old ones – is that the inventions looks so… obvious today. Like this 1870 patent for an improvement in shaving-mugs. A hundred and fifty three year later is just a shaving mug. Back in 1870 Frank B Clock’s idea was a non-obvious improvement to the state of art. Time marches on, I guess – for better or worse.

The problem of how to store our brushes have been with us a long time. Store it bristles up, and the handle gets wet. Store it bristles down, and the bristles may deform. Luckily Samuel T Varian have come up with a simple shaving-brush holder that can easily be clipped onto your shaving mug. Or anywhere else, for that matter.

There are fewer patents for shaving mugs than there are for razors. Even so, some basic ideas gets recycled. A few years ago I snarked on a 1875 patent for a shaving mug where you could screw your soap down to keep it from falling out or flipping around. Just a few years later Mr Joseph Maria Blasi solved the same problem with a rather more spiky shaving mug.

Have you ever gotten fed up with how the cake of soap sits at the bottom of the shaving cup, being wet and gross and all that stuff? Me neither, but in our defence most of the people treating traditional wetshaving as a hobby have more than one soap. And most of us don’t keep it in a single shaving mug. But way back then, when a single cake of soap kept in a mug was the order of the day? I can definitely see the appeal of John Richardson’s 1892 patent for a shaving soap holder.

And it is a nice, simple idea too. But before we look closer, let us see what John wanted to achieve: