The use of customer reviews and letters of recommendation do – possible to the surprise of people who have grown up since online shopping became a huge thing – go back decades, if not centuries. During my meandering online wanderings I’ve found this example from a century ago.
As far as a little searching can tell me, Ralph V. Hinkle was no one special… not famous, at least not outside his immediate area. An Every-man, if you prefer that term, someone other customers could relate to.
There is off course the possibility of the letter being fake, written by the Rubberset marketing department, but would that be any different than today?
As an aside my oldest brush still in rotation is about a decade old too; an Omega 10048 – it shed a few hairs the first year or so, but is otherwise even better now than when I took it out of the box.
Is this why there are so many vintage Gillettes in near mint condition? You don’t know what to get for your friend, so you buy him a razor… just as several other friends of him did. After all, the ad promises that it’ll be “the happiest hit of the all the gifts at Christmas”.
Guy ends up with half a dozen razors, sticks five in a drawer and uses just one…
If old advertisements are to be believed, wetshavers in the Olden Days must bave been pretty easy to annoy…
Wetshaving requires water, and water means pipes and valves. And all that means that somewhere there has to be a water shut off valve, so I can shut off the water whenever a packing or O-ring needs replacing in a tap. Thus the main water shut off valve can be considered an “attaching and connecting part” of my shave
In my case, the shut off valve have – as I discovered a little while ago – corroded to the point of not shutting the water off. And since a water shut of valve that isn’t shutting the water off kind of negates the whole point (not to mention means that I can’t change the O-ring in the tap that drips), it was time to call in the professionals; i.e.: the plumber.
So out with the old:
And in with the new:
Whole thing done in less than an hour, including small talk and paperwork. And yes, it does shut off completely, allowing me to replace O-rings in peace…
