Pumice or depilatory creams made from combinations of arsenic, starch and quicklime were used 6000 years ago by men and women in ancient Egypt. Hair removal had progressed from seashell “tweezers” used to pluck out strands to flint blades by 30,000BC. He contracted the American Chain and Cable Company (ACCC) to make them at a plant in Jersey City.Ī 1953 advertisement for a Schick electric razor. He sold both patents to raise capital for his shaving projects and established the Schick Magazine Repeating Razor Company in 1925.

While working on the injector razor blade, in 1921 Schick also developed two pencil sharpeners, marketed as the Pencilaid and Pencilknife. A metal injector blade-disposal-and-loading mechanism automatically pushed out a used blade from the razor and replaced it with a new one, avoiding human contact with the cutting edge. His first prototype, completed in 1921 and patented in 1923, built on his experience with repeating rifles used in the army. The difficulties of shaving at Arctic temperatures with frozen fingers and icy water inspired his invention of two shaving devices. Schick was also obsessively clean-shaven and, like ancient Egyptians, considered a daily shave as a mark of civility and self-respect.

In his five years there, he was involved in building telegraph lines in remote, frozen terrain.Ī client gets a shave with a cutthroat, or open, razor. Schick was assigned in 1905 to Fort Gibbon in Alaska, a staging camp for military construction projects on the Yukon and Tanana rivers. When the Spanish-American War began in 1898, Schick enlisted in the US Army Infantry in Oregon, and with his fluent Spanish was dispatched to the Philippines, earning a commission as a second lieutenant for his ability in organising military construction crews.Īfter contracting severe dysentery that almost cost his life and required a year-long hospital recovery, Schick was declared fit to return to service, with the stipulation he be stationed in cold climates to reduce the risk of another bout of dysentery. At 16, his father put him in charge of building a railway spur line to transport coal to a smelting forge. His father Valentine was a German immigrant who staked prospector’s claims and established a coal mining company, where Jacob began working as a child. Jacob Schick invented the electric razor in 1928.īorn in Ottumwa, Iowa, Schick grew up in Los Cerillos, New Mexico and learned to read and write English, German, and Spanish. Despite the Great Depression, Schick’s gadget was a huge success, selling more than a million shavers, priced at $25 each, in two years. After selling an existing razor businesses, his Schick Dry Razor Company produced its first electric razor in 1931. In what appears an inspired move, given the average man spends 3000 hours of his life in a lather, Swift’s barber wanted help with a sign after he decided in the late 1600s to take over a small public-house, where he would continue his grooming service.ĭespite the beer and poetic banner, it is unlikely Swift’s favoured barber at Laracor or Trim, in rural Meath, enjoyed the success of another bristle entrepreneur who revolutionised shaving almost 300 years later.Īmerican Jacob Schick, born 140 years ago on September 16, 1877, patented the first electric razor in 1928.

WHEN his Irish barber decided to diversify, author and poet Jonathan Swift frothed up the perfect slogan: “Rove not from pole to pole, but step in here, Where nought excels the shaving but - the beer.”

Jacob schick electric razor