A barber in a XVIIth century engraving.
A presentation of the Electric Shaver Page
The article reproduced below was from the Italian publication Stileindustria, No. 2, May 1995. The article was published in both Italian and English. The English text follows:
The Evolution of the Razor
by Marco Migliari
A barber in a XVIIth century engraving.
Rendering the ritual of shaving both safer and faster: two objectives which transformed the typology of a quotidian utensil, from the classic straight razor to the disposable twin-blade to the "intelligent" electric razor.
While the Marquis de Sade celebrated the pleasures of even the most painful acts, the act of shaving was notably excluded, and this view may well have been shared by his contemporary Jean-Jacques Perret, a cutter by profession. Divesting the act of shaving from the bothersome wounds that accompany it was indeed one of the objectives of the treatise written by the French artisan in 1770, La Pogonotomie, or The Art of Learning to Shave Oneself, in which the various tools for shaving are examined and the idea of a safety razor is proposed.
The fact that a treatise on a new way of shaving was written at all reveals an awareness that, for the masses, this was above all a problem of instruction, of the performance and proper use of objects. The notion of the razor as a consumer item required a substantial modification of the image of the "free hand", or straight razor, still used today by some barbers. The original idea was to offer two supplementary benefits: a facility of use that would encourage everyone to use it, and a degree of safety that would allow anyone to do so. The form of the razor proposed by Perret (which reminded him of a plane and was indeed called by that very name in French a rabot) is really just a variation on the straight razor.
Its novelty consisted in an L-shaped guard made of wood that ensconced the blade and prevented it from cutting too deeply into the skin. The Perret razor, which was manufacturered with a certain degree of success, was still too close to the form (and the consequent difficulty of use) of its predecessor, and for this reason it cannot be considered the true formal prototype for the safety razor that followed which would not enjoy widespread use until a century later and would have a completely different form. But the Perret razor certainly contributed to creating the necessary conditions for a morphological evolution of the type of razor that would priorise safety.
On the set of the film Rio Bravo by Howard
Hawks, 1959. Angie Dickinson shaves Dean Martin, while John Wayne amusedly
looks on.
The grip of a barber's straight razor is not only uncomfortable when shaving oneself, but requires above all "a wise and steady hand to guide it" (Perret). It has been demonstrated that shaving oneself with a straight razor requires about a half hour, with great risk of cutting oneself.
The first decades of the 19th century saw numerous experiments aimed at lending a measure of protection to the razor, but the first true innovation wouldn't come until 1847 when the English inventor William Henson placed the blade perpendicularly to the handle, which led to its being called the "hoe-type razor".
It is interesting to note how the names adopted to define these new configurations (hoe, plane) function as archetypes, insofar as these tools can be seen as "shaving" the earth, or a block of wood as the case may be. It would be useful to compile these unexpected relationships in a geneological tree of other typologies of quotidian objects.
The "hoe type" razor radically changed the way of gripping the utensil, and because of its greater manageabiltiy, it enjoyed immediate success. This is the design that can be considered the forerunner of the razors we use today. In 1880, the Kampfe brothers filed a patent in the United States for the first true safety razor.
The blade of the razor, as it came to be called, was inserted into a protective mechanism that allowed only the edge to protrude.
Composition of razor blades,
reflecting the natural development of razor and shaving cream
manufacturers.
However, the blades were still manufactured by forging, in the same way as that of the straight razor, and thus required special sharpening. The next step would demand that the blade be conceived in an entirely new way, and that is precisely what King Camp Gillette did when he came up with the idea of a disposable blade, to be discarded after limited use. His blade, cut from a template rather than forged, was sharpened on both sides and offered good quality at low cost. In 1901, Gillette patented his invention and from 1903 began selling it, with total sales for the first year reaching 51 razors and 168 blades. But success came quickly--already by the second year he had sold 90,000 razors and 123,000 blades. The contingent of American soldiers stationed in Europe during the First World War, each of them equipped with a modern razor to facilitate daily shaving duties, provided an efficiacious means of promotion and publicity. In 1939 the American razor manufacturer Schick hit the market with the first successful electric razor and from then on the "hand-made" civilisation of past began to coexist with a newly mechanised civilisation in which there were even machines for shaving. The first attempts at the mechanisation of the razor sought to utilize a small motor that would move the blade. An important contribution to the final definition of the electric razor came in 1930 with the realization of the spring razor which, by means of a flywheel wound by hand, would operate automatically for a short period. The typologies of these shaving machines were oriented from the start in two directions, still with us today, the vibrating blade and the rotary blade. The head of an electric razor is comprised of a protective screen and sharp moving blades which graze the back of the screen, cutting the whiskers that penetrate it. At the end of the '50s, the blades of the rotary head were mounted on flexible ball joints so as to better follow the form of the face, and from this moment onward, both manual and electric razors began competing to improve performance, each category stimulated by the progress made in the other.
Twin-blade razor, presented by Gillette in 1971, had
precursors as early as the 1930s.
Razor with a ribbon-type blade coiled in two cartridges,
analogous to the system of the typerwriter ribbon.
Dry" spring razor in Bakelite, manuevered by pressing
the lever.
Dry" spring razor in Bakelite,
c.1930 operated by pulling the cord.