I imagine that ever since the invention of shaving cream in a tube, people have been wanting a way to get the cream from the tube and onto their face. Preferable without getting soapy fingers, or accidentally squeezing out too much. Luckily George E Carlson¹ had a solution in the form of a rotary spreader.

Carlson wasn’t the only man with a solution, of course. The same year Carlson filed the application, C W Brynan patented a shaving cream spreader. And a few years later N Testi secured a patent for a dispensing tube.

In the same year George Schmidt patented his shaving brush container, William Edward Lake secured a patent on behalf of the Colgate Company for an improvements in cakes of shaving soaps. An improvement that, if the claims are taken at face value, would make the cakes of soaps more secure both in shipment and in the shaving mug.

Continuing on the theme of antiseptic and hygienic shaving brushes, today we have George A Schmidt’s shaving brush container. Schmidt held several patents, most of them on soap dispensers. So it is perhaps not a big surprise that his shaving brush container was also meant to contain some of his own antiseptic soap.

Antiseptic – like hygienic, sanitary, aseptic, and disposable – is a word that keeps popping up in patent descriptions of shaving gear. This seem to have been especially prevalent in the first half of the last century, before the discovery of penicillin and other effective antibiotics made a cut or a nick more of a nuisance than a real threat to life and health. Today’s patent for an antiseptic shaving brush was filed by Aron Braunstein and Angel Rattiner back in early 1905.