There is more than one way to skin a cat. In the same vein, there is more than one way to make adjustable razors. As I mentioned last week, you can change the distance between the top cap and bottom plate. You can change the blade curvature. Or you can more the guard back and forth. This last option seems to have been a minor obsession of the Warner Lambert Co. – because in addition to the patent by Peter Bowman and Ernest F Kiraly assigned to Warner Lambert, I found a slightly earlier patent by Mr Leopold K Kuhnl that is also assigned to Warner Lambert. And it is adjustable in the same manner, but differs in the details.

There are a couple of common ways to make an adjustable safety razor. You can change the distance between the top cap and bottom plate, like the Gillette adjustable razors do. You can change the blade curvature, as done in the Rockwell and others. Or you can opt for the much less common idea of moving the guard back and forth, like J E Fuller’s 1890 patent hints at.

It was this less common way of doing things that features in Peter Bowman and Ernest F Kiraly’s patented adjustable safety razor. The application was filed in 1974, and granted the year after. The most novel thing is how adjustability was controlled.

In 1926 Rudolph C G Staats-Oels filed a patent for an improvement in safety razors. I’m not sure how much of an improvement it was. It was certainly novel, by the standards of the day. For starters, it was a slant. Or as the patent put it, it had a head:

…wherein the transverse curvature of the blade will be gradually increased from one end toward the other thereof.

From US patent 1,633,139

The turn of the last century was an paradigm shift when it came to shaving technology. Wedge blades – which had been the cutting edge¹ in the late 19^th century – was replaced with the bleeding edge² of easily manufactured and replaced thin steel blade. The Scimitar razor straddled the line, in that it could use both .