The Safety Razor and the Electric Razor

In order to make shaving safe, comfortable and easy, someone would have to completely re-conceptualize the shaving tool. That someone turned out to be a man named King Gillette.

Gillette's idea was brilliant in its simplicity. His goal was to create a small, inexpensive metal blade that would be sharpened in a factory and then thrown away when it became dull. In Patent number 775134, Gillette put it this way:

A main object of my invention is to provide a safety-razor in which the necessity of honing and stropping the blade is done away with. By doing this, Gillette would accomplish three goals:

    1. He would completely eliminate the tedium and "art" of manual sharpening, making the act of shaving much simpler.
    2. He would replace the inherently dangerous straight razor with the "safety razor" -- a device where injury is nearly impossible.
    3. He would create one of the greatest business models ever devised. Millions of people would be shaving, and these people would be using one of Gillette's blades every week. If Gillette made a little money off of each blade, he would become fabulously wealthy.


Image courtesy U.S. Patent Office
Gillette's safety razor

The hard part was sharpening the blade in a factory. Gillette's idea was to take thin, rolled steel, stamp it into small, rectangular shapes and then sharpen the edges. That seems simple enough today, but at the time it had never been done. There were two separate problems that had to be solved:

  • Hardening the steel so that it would hold a sharp edge. Heating steel to about 2,000 degrees F and then cooling it off hardens it. The thin metal in Gillette's blades had a tendency to warp because it would cool quickly and unevenly.
  • Actually sharpening the edge of such a thin, small piece of metal.
Both of these problem turned out to be much more difficult than anticipated. In fact, it took Gillette six years of trying before he and an engineer named William Nickerson got the process worked out. The heating problem was originally solved by sandwiching the blades between thicker pieces of slower-cooling metal during the heating and cooling process. The second problem was solved through increasing levels of automation. The first razor blades produced by Gillette were sharpened almost completely by hand. Eventually, automation dropped the cost of each blade down to a penny, while they sold for about a dime each.

The rest, as they say, is history. When Proctor and Gamble bought Gillette in 2005, it paid more than $50 billion for the company.

The Electric Razor


Image courtesy Amazon
A modern Norelco razor
Gillette introduced his shaving system in 1901. By the end of WWI in 1919, the act of shaving had been completely transformed in the United States. Beards were out and the clean-shaven look was nearly required of all men.

Then, in 1928, the act of shaving was re-conceptualized again by a man named Jacob Schick. Schick got his start in the shaving business by inventing a system for loading a razor with a new blade without ever touching the blade (the forerunner of "injector" razors). But Schick's ultimate goal was to eliminate the shaving cream and water altogether and create a dry shaving system. To do this, Schick invented the electric razor.

Schick's first problem was a creative one -- he had to "see" shaving in a completely different way. Up until the time Schick invented his shaver, shaving had always been done with a blade that slices. The blade has to be sharp enough to slice off the hair in the same way that a knife slices through a stick of butter. Schick's electric razor, on the other hand, would use the same concept behind a pair of scissors. The hair is actually sheered off.

If you actually try to shave with a pair of scissors, you quickly realize that it can not work (even with the tiniest pair of manicuring scissors). You are not able to get close enough to the skin with scissors. This is Schick's second area of innovation. In an electric razor, an incredibly thin, perforated piece of metal called the foil is what actually touches the skin. The hairs poke through the perforations in the metal and then are sliced off by a blade on the other side of the foil. The blades in an electric razor can either oscillate back and forth (as in Schick's original design) or they can spin (as in the Norelco design).


Image courtesy Jarpur, Stock.xchng
The foil on an electric razor

Having re-conceptualized the idea of shaving, Schick faced another problem. Electric motors in the 1920s had not yet been miniaturized to the point where they could fit in a hand-held device. Schick's first design had the motor (about the size of a grapefruit) in one case. It then connected to the shaving head with a flexible drive shaft. Looking back on it today, this design seems completely ridiculous. But there really was no other way to do it given the motors available at the time.

However, motors were shrinking and all Schick had to do was wait. In 1931 he released his first handheld electric shaver, complete with a small internal motor.