Good morning, Whitewater
From 4 to 5 p.m. today, there’s a public meeting of the Tree Commission in Whitewater. Why just 4 to 5, though? Hard to believe that one can contain that work into the cramped space of one mere hour. There must be thousands of trees in Whitewater — that’s not a lot of time, per tree. A silver maple’s getting shortchanged in all this, most likely.
Wired has a story about American ingenuity today, “March 18, 1931: The Schick Hits the Fans,” about the introduction of the first useful electric shavers:
1931: The first practical, electric shavers go on sale. They’re definitely a cut above their clumsy predecessors.
The gizmos were the brainchild of Jacob Schick. He served in the U.S. Army in the Philippines during the Spanish-American War and after. Schick developed dysentery in the tropics, and after a yearlong recovery, the Army transferred him to Alaska for his health….
Schick set his mind to devising a more comfortable way to shave. He devised rough plans, so to speak, for a shaving head at the end of a flexible cable that was powered by an external motor. He sent the idea to manufacturers, and they quickly rejected the idea….
After the war, he wanted to improve and market his electric shaver invention, but needed capital. So he applied the concept of the ammunition clip to the razor with the Magazine Repeating Razor. It was a forerunner of the injector razor: You could load and unload the blade without risk of cutting your fingers.
He sold that business off to return to the electric shaver. With exquisite timing, he put his first electric shavers on the market in 1929, just in time for the stock market collapse and ensuing Great Depression. The early models didn’t sell well. The design was still a clumsy contraption with a heavy motor connected by a metal cable to the reciprocating shaving head.
Business was so bad that the Schicks had to mortgage their home to get money to keep the company going. But Schick figured out how to make his product a success by making it handy.
He got rid of the flexible cable and put a small electric motor inside the same unit as the shaving head. The entire apparatus was encased in sleek, black bakelite and fit comfortably in your hand. An electric appliance cord supplied power to the motor, which had to be kick-started by a turn-wheel switch on the unit.Schick set up a factory in Stamford, Connecticut. The new model went on sale in New York City on March 18, 1931.
They sold for $25 each (that’s about $350 in today’s money). About 3,000 moved the first year, and sales increased until 1.5 million were in users’ hands by 1937….
Schick got rich and retired to Canada. But his lingering health problems caught up with him, and he died in 1937. He said the lifespan of a man who shaved correctly every day would be 120 — he lived less than half that time.