Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things (41 page)

Look sharp. Ancient Egyptians used bronze straight razors, and American Indians tweezed their whiskers between halves of a clam shell. Gillette’s safety razor and disposable blades marked the first shaving breakthrough
.

By General Burnside’s era, the shaving razor had changed little in appearance from the ancient Egyptian instrument. There had already been several attempts, however, to design a safer razor.

Safety Razor: 1762, France

For centuries, a young man (or woman) learned painfully, through nicking and gashing the skin, how to shave safely with a sharp straight razor. The first instrument specifically designed as a safety razor appeared in France in 1762, invented by a professional barber, Jean Jacques Perret. It employed a metal guard, placed along one edge of the blade, to prevent the blade from accidentally slicing into the shaver’s skin. About seventy years later, in Sheffield, England, an improved design debuted, which was lighter-weight and less cumbersome to use. The modern T-shaped razor was an American invention of the 1880s, but its irreplaceable blade had to be sharpened regularly.

The first real shaving revolution was launched almost single-handedly by a traveling salesman-inventor named King Gillette.

Born in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, in 1855, Gillette was tall, broad-shouldered, aristocratically handsome, and fiercely determined to succeed. He set out not to give shavers a better razor but to give the world an entirely new social order. In 1894, he published
The Human Drift
, a rambling, socialistic blueprint for reform, which he dedicated “To All Mankind.” Perhaps
every man and woman who shaves today should be thankful that the book was a complete failure.

Gillette turned elsewhere for his fortune. A friend, William Painter, inventor of the throwaway bottle cap, suggested that the failed author and traveling salesman devise an item that, like the bottle cap, was used once, discarded, then replaced.

The idea intrigued Gillette. For a year, at his home in Brookline, Massachusetts, he repeatedly ran through the alphabet, listing household and business items in frequent use.

Nothing clicked until one morning in 1895. Gillette started to shave and found his razor edge dull beyond use. The instrument would have to be taken to a barber or a cutler for professional sharpening, a familiar, disruptive routine. He later wrote: “As I stood there with the razor in my hand, my eyes resting on it as lightly as a bird settling down on its nest, the Gillette razor and disposable blade were born.”

The concept was simple, but the technology took more than six years to perfect. Toolmakers Gillette contacted told him that small, inexpensive, paper-thin steel blades were impossible to manufacture. Engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology advised him to simply drop the project. One MIT professor, though, William Nickerson, inventor of a pushbutton system for elevators, decided in 1901 to collaborate with Gillette.

The first fruits of their joint effort went on sale in 1903—a batch of fifty-one razors (at five dollars apiece) and 168 disposable blades. Word of the razor’s safety and convenience spread so rapidly that production could not keep pace with demand.

In 1906, Americans bought 300,000 razors and half a million blades, each package bearing Gillette’s portrait and signature. And when America entered World War I, the government placed an order for 3.5 million razors and 36 million blades—enough to keep the entire American armed forces clean-shaven. The war introduced men from all parts of the globe to Gillette’s invention, and on returning home from the battlefield they wanted Gillette razors and a steady supply of disposable blades.

King Gillette retired in 1931, a millionaire many times over. That same year, the razor blade was confronted by the first significant challenger in its long and exclusive history: the electric shaver.

Electric Shaver: 1931, United States

While serving in the U.S. Army, Jacob Schick was issued a Gillette razor and blades. He had no complaint with the product. It always provided a close, comfortable shave—except when water was unavailable, or soap, or shave cream; or if cold winter water could not be heated. Once, laid up in an Alaskan base with a sprained ankle, he had to crack a layer of surface ice every morning to dip his razor into water.

After the war, Schick set out to invent what he called a “dry razor,” operated by an electric motor.

A major drawback was that most reliable, powerful motors were larger, and heavier, than a breadbox. For five years, Schick worked to perfect his own small electric motor, which he patented in 1923.

But obstacles continued to thwart his best efforts. Financial backers he approached shaved satisfactorily with Gillette razors and blades, as did millions of people worldwide; was an electric razor really necessary? Schick thought so. He mortgaged his home, sank into debt, and produced his first commercial electric razor, with a steep twenty-five-dollar price tag, in 1931—the depths of the Depression.

That first year, Jacob Schick sold only three thousand shavers.

The next year, he made a small profit, which he reinvested in national advertising. By repeating that policy year after year, in 1937 he sold almost two million electric shavers, in the United States, Canada, and England. The electric razor might not have been one of life’s necessities, but it was one of the twentieth century’s electric novelties, and Jacob Schick had proved that a market existed for the shavers.

Just as Schick had competed with the name Gillette in the ’30s, in the ’40s such names as Remington and Sunbeam competed with Schick. Remington, in 1940, made industry history when it introduced the two-headed shaver. Named the Dual, it pioneered the modern trend toward multiheaded shavers. And that same year, Remington created something of a minor sensation when it announced an electric shaver designed expressly for women—who for centuries had plucked, waxed, dipilatoried, and scraped off unwanted body hair, receiving little mention in the documented history of shaving.

Soap: 600
B.C
., Phoenicia

A staple of every bathroom, soap has served a variety of cleansing and medicinal purposes since its discovery. It has been in and out of vogue, praised as the acme of civilization by one nation while scorned as an excess of fastidiousness by a neighbor.

About four thousand years ago, the Hittites of Asia Minor cleaned their hands with the ash of the soapwort plant suspended in water. In the same era, the Sumerians in Ur concocted alkali solutions to wash themselves. Technically, neither of these preparations was soap, though close to the actual product, which was developed in 600
B.C
. by the seafaring Phoenicians. In the process that today is known as saponification, the Phoenicians boiled goat fat, water, and ash high in potassium carbonate, permitting the liquid to evaporate to form solid, waxy soap. (See also “Detergent,” page 152.)

Over the next twenty centuries, the fortunes of soap would follow closely the beliefs of Western hygiene—and religion. During the Middle Ages, for
example, when the Christian Church warned of the evils of exposing the flesh, even to bathe, production of soap virtually came to a halt. And when medical science later identified bacteria as a leading cause of disease, soap production soared. Throughout all those years, soap, variously scented and colored, was essentially the same product as that developed by the Phoenicians. Not until a factory accident in 1879 would a new and truly novel soap surface, so to speak.

Floating Soap
. One morning in 1878, thirty-two-year-old Harley Procter decided that the soap and candle company founded by his father should produce a new, creamy white, delicately scented soap, one to compete with the finest imported castle soaps of the day.

As suppliers of soap to the Union Army during the Civil War, the company was suited to such a challenge. And Procter’s cousin James Gamble, a chemist, soon produced the desired product. Named simply White Soap, it yielded a rich lather, even in cold water, and had a smooth, homogeneous consistency. Procter’s and Gamble’s White Soap was not yet christened Ivory, nor did it then float.

Soap production began, and the product sold well. One day, a factory worker overseeing soap vats broke for lunch, forgetting to switch off the master mixing machine. On returning, he realized that too much air had been whipped into the soapy solution. Reluctant to discard the batch, he poured it into hardening and cutting frames, and bars of history’s first air-laden, floating soap were delivered to regional stores.

Consumer reaction was almost immediate. The factory was swamped with letters requesting more of the remarkable soap that could not be lost under murky water because it bobbed up to the surface. Perceiving they were beneficiaries of a fortunate accident, Harley Procter and James Gamble ordered that all White Soap from then on be given an extra-long whipping.

White Soap, though, was too prosaic a label for such an innovative product.

Mulling over a long list of possible names one Sunday morning in church, Harley Procter was inspired by a single word when the pastor read the Forty-fifth Psalm: “All thy garments smell of myrrh, and aloes, and cassia, out of the ivory palaces, whereby they have made thee glad.”

The first bars of Ivory Soap debuted in October 1879, the same month that Thomas Edison successfully tested the incandescent light bulb—two events seemingly unrelated. But the astute businessman Harley Procter foresaw that the electric light would virtually snuff out his profitable candle trade, so he decided to heavily promote history’s first floating soap.

It was Procter’s idea to etch a groove across the middle of each economy-size bar of Ivory. It enabled homemakers to decide for themselves whether they wanted one large laundry-size bar or two smaller toilet-size cakes. And the company would only have to manufacture a single item.

In an effort to test Ivory’s quality, Procter sent the soap to chemistry
professors and independent laboratories for analyses. One report in particular impressed him. It stated that the soap had few impurities—only 56/100 of one percent. Procter flipped the negative statement into a positive one, which became the hallmark of the company’s campaign: Ivory Soap was “99 and 44/100 percent pure.”

From a psychological standpoint, the phrase was a stroke of advertising genius, for the concepts of purity and floatability did much to reinforce each other—and to sell soap. To further dramatize the soap’s purity and mildness, Procter introduced the “Ivory Baby,” supplying shopkeepers with life-size cardboard display posters. Madison Avenue, then and now, claims that the campaign to persuade American home owners to purchase Ivory Soap was one of the most effective in the history of advertising.

As a young man, Harley Procter had promised himself that if he was a success in business, he’d retire at age forty-five. He became such a success because of the floating soap that he permitted himself the luxury of retiring a year early, at forty-four.

Shampoo: 1890s, Germany

The main function of a shampoo is to remove the scalp’s natural sebum oil from the hair, for it is the oil that causes dirt and hairdressing preparations to stick tenaciously. Ordinary soap is not up to the task, for it deposits its own scum.

The job is easy for a detergent, but detergents were not discovered until late in the last century, or manufactured in any sizable quantity until the 1930s. How, then, over the centuries did people effectively clean their hair?

The ancient Egyptians started one trend with the use of water and citrus juice, the citric acid effectively cutting sebum oil. Homemade citrus preparations, scented, and occasionally blended with small quantities of soap, were popular for centuries.

A detergent-like alternative appeared in Europe in the late Middle Ages. It involved boiling water and soap with soda or potash, which provides the mixture with a high concentration of negatively charged hydroxyl ions, the basis of good modern-day shampoos. Similar to shampoo yet closer to soap, these brews were homemade and their formulas handed down from generation to generation.

Ironically, the word “shampoo” originated in England at about the same time German chemists were discovering the true detergents that would become modern shampoos. In the 1870s, the British government had taken control of India from the ruling British East India Company, granting the Hindu-speaking Indians progressively more power in local affairs. Indian fashion and art, as well as Hindu phrases, were the vogue in England. In that decade, au courant British hairdressers coined the word “shampoo,” from the Hindu
champo
, meaning “to massage” or “to knead.”

Shampoo was not a bottled liquid to be purchased in a store. It was a
wet, soapy hair and scalp massage available to patrons of fashionable British salons. The cleansing preparations, secretly guarded by each salon, were brewed on the premises by hairdressers employing variations on the traditional formula of water, soap, and soda. Technically, the first true detergent-based shampoo was produced in Germany in the 1890s. When, after World War I, the product was marketed as commercial hair-cleansing preparations, the label “shampoo” was awaiting them.