Vendor lock-in must be a razor manufacturers wet dream; once you gotten inside their walled garden, it’s too much effort / cost to get out again. Gillette had this going for them with the traditional DE safety razor, until their patents expired – which basically turned DE’s into open source shaving. Ever since they have been trying to regain it, with they (and other multinationals) have managed more-or-less with the advent of the cartridges.

…the magazine razor of our invention includes a head containing a chamber or compartment for a blade stack and having a front wall providing a blade seat at its upper edge. A friction plate overlies the blade seat and engages the blade thereon and a reciprocatory cap is mounted on the head and provided with feeding lugs projecting through apertures in the friction plate for advancing one blade after another from the stack to the blade seat. A complete reciprocation of this cap is all that is necessary in ejecting a used blage from the razor head and replacing it by a fresh As herein shown the razor is organized to handle thin fiat single edged blades in which both the sharpened and unsharpened edges of the blade are offset with respect to the ends of the blade so as to permit one blade to be located by engagement with a second blade lying in the same plane while providing clearance for its sharpened edge.

You want one of the fancy vibrating razors, but can’t afford one?

Fear not, fellow shaver; Mr Harry F Partridge patented the solution back in ’46 – the aptly named “appliance for vibrating a safety razor”. Sleek and unobtrusive… uhm.. well, lumpy and rather obtrusive to be honest… anyhow… you simply clip the appliance onto your razor – or rather; you clip your razor into the appliance – and said appliance improves the shave in much the same way painting go-faster-stripes on an old POS car turns it into a sleek, modern race car. In other words, probably not at all.

In Mr Partridge’s own words:

My present invention relates to an improved razor and more particularly to a means for mounting and reciprocating the conventional safety razor wherein the razor including its blade is reciprocated in short swift strokes longitudinally of the blade and the blade head so that the razor will vibrate laterally as it is drawn over the face of the user.

This vibration of the razor head and its blade will increase the cutting effect of the razor blade and will result in a vastly improved shaving operation with a closer shave and a less painful shave.