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.
One man, John Breck, helped launch the shampoo business in America, turning his personal battle against baldness into a profitable enterprise.
In the early 1900s, the twenty-five-year-old Breck, captain of a Massachusetts volunteer fire department, was beginning to lose his hair. Although several New England doctors he consulted assured him there was no cure for baldness, the handsome, vain young firefighter refused to accept the prognosis.
Preserving his remaining hair became an obsession. He developed home hair-restoring preparations and various scalp-massage techniques, and in 1908 opened his own scalp-treatment center in Springfield. When his shampoos became popular items among local beauty salons, Breck expanded his line of hair and scalp products, as well as the region he serviced. He introduced a shampoo for normal hair in 1930, and three years later, shampoos for oily and dry hair. By the end of the decade, Breck’s hair care business was nationwide, becoming at one point America’s leading producer of shampoos. Of all his successful hair preparations, though, none was able to arrest his own advancing baldness.
Chapter 9
Atop the Vanity
Cosmetics: 8,000 Years Ago, Middle East
A thing of beauty may be a joy forever, but keeping it that way can be a costly matter. American men and women, in the name of vanity, spend more than five billion dollars a year in beauty parlors and barbershops, at cosmetic and toiletry counters.
Perhaps no one should be surprised—or alarmed—at this display of grooming, since it has been going on for at least eight thousand years. Painting, perfuming, and powdering the face and body, and dyeing the hair, began as parts of religious and war rites and are at least as old as written history. Archaeologists unearthed palettes for grinding and mixing face powder and eye paint dating to 6000 B.C.
In ancient Egypt by 4000 B.C., beauty shops and perfume factories were flourishing, and the art of makeup was already highly skilled and widely practiced. We know that the favorite color for eyeshade then was green, the preferred lipstick blue-black, the acceptable rouge red, and that fashionable Egyptian women stained the flesh of their fingers and feet a reddish orange with henna. And in those bare-breasted times, a woman accented veins on her bosom in blue and tipped her nipples gold.
Egyptian men were no less vain—in death as well as life. They stocked their tombs with a copious supply of cosmetics for the afterlife. In the 1920s, when the tomb of King Tutankhamen, who ruled about 1350 B.C., was opened, several small jars of skin cream, lip color, and cheek rouge were discovered—still usable and possessing elusive fragrances.
In fact, during the centuries prior to the Christian era, every recorded culture lavishly adorned itself in powders, perfumes, and paints—all, that is, except the Greeks.
Egyptian woman at her toilet. Lipstick was blue-black, eye shadow green, bare nipples were tipped in gold paint.
Unlike the Romans, who assimilated and practiced Egyptian makeup technology, the Greeks favored a natural appearance. From the time of the twelfth-century Dorian invasions until about 700 B.C., the struggling Greeks had little time for languorous pleasures of self-adornment. And when their society became established and prosperous during the Golden Age of the fifth century B.C., it was dominated by an ideal of masculinity and natural ruggedness. Scholastics and athletics prevailed. Women were chattels. The male, unadorned and unclothed, was the perfect creature.
During this time, the craft of cosmetics, gleaned from the Egyptians, was preserved in Greece through the courtesans. These mistresses of the wealthy sported painted faces, coiffed hair, and perfumed bodies. They also perfumed their breath by carrying aromatic liquid or oil in their mouths and rolling it about with the tongue. The breath freshener, apparently history’s first, was not swallowed but discreetly spit out at the appropriate time.
Among Greek courtesans we also find the first reference in history to blond hair in women as more desirable than black. The lighter color connoted innocence, superior social status, and sexual desirability, and courtesans achieved the shade with the application of an apple-scented pomade of yellow flower petals, pollen, and potassium salt.
In sharp contrast to the Greeks, Roman men and women were often unrestrained in their use of cosmetics. Roman soldiers returned from Eastern duty laden with, and often wearing, Indian perfumes, cosmetics, and a blond hair preparation of yellow flour, pollen, and fine gold dust. And there is considerable evidence that fashionable Roman women had on their vanity virtually every beauty aid available today. The first-century epigrammatist Martial criticized a lady friend, Galla, for wholly making over her appearance: “While you remain at home, Galla, your hair is at the hairdresser’s; you take out your teeth at night and sleep tucked away in a hundred cosmetics boxes—even your face does not sleep with you. Then you wink at men under an eyebrow you took out of a drawer that same morning.”
Given the Roman predilection for beauty aids, etymologists for a long time believed that our word “cosmetic” came from the name of the most famous makeup merchant in the Roman Empire during the reign of Julius Caesar: Cosmis. More recently, they concluded that it stems from the Greek Kosmetikos, meaning “skilled in decorating.”
Eye Makeup: Pre-4000 B.C., Egypt
Perhaps because the eyes, more than any other body part, reveal inner thoughts and emotions, they have been throughout history elaborately adorned. The ancient Egyptians, by 4000 B.C., had already zeroed in on the eye as the chief focus for facial makeup. The preferred green eye shadow was made from powdered malachite, a green copper ore, and applied heavily to both upper and lower eyelids. Outlining the eyes and darkening the lashes and eyebrows were achieved with
a black paste called kohl, made from powdered antimony, burnt almonds, black oxide of copper, and brown clay ocher. The paste was stored in small alabaster pots and, moistened by saliva, was applied with ivory, wood, or metal sticks, not unlike a modern eyebrow pencil. Scores of filled kohl pots have been preserved.
Fashionable Egyptian men and women also sported history’s first eye glitter. In a mortar, they crushed the iridescent shells of beetles to a coarse powder, then they mixed it with their malachite eye shadow.
Many Egyptian women shaved their eyebrows and applied false ones, as did later Greek courtesans. But real or false, eyebrows that met above the nose were favored, and Egyptians and Greeks used kohl pencils to connect what nature had not.
Eye adornment was also the most popular form of makeup among the Hebrews. The custom was introduced to Israel around 850 B.C. by Queen Jezebel, wife of King Ahab. A Sidonian princess, she was familiar with the customs of Phoenicia, then a center of culture and fashion. The Bible refers to her use of cosmetics (2 Kings 9:30): “And when Jehu was come to Jezreel, Jezebel heard of it; and she painted her face…” From the palace window, heavily made up, she taunted Jehu, her son’s rival for the throne, until her eunuchs, on Jehu’s orders, pushed her out. It was Jezebel’s cruel disregard for the rights of the common man, and her defiance of the Hebrew prophets Elijah and Elisha, that earned her the reputation as the archetype of the wicked woman. She gave cosmetics a bad name for centuries.
Rouge, Facial Powder, Lipstick: 4000 B.C., Near East
Although Greek men prized a natural appearance and eschewed the use of most cosmetics, they did resort to rouge to color the cheeks. And Greek courtesans heightened rouge’s redness by first coating their skin with white powder. The large quantities of lead in this powder, which would whiten European women’s faces, necks, and bosoms for the next two thousand years, eventually destroyed complexions and resulted in countless premature deaths.
Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things Page 29