Returning once again to razors, in 1847, an English inventor, William Henson, patented a novel razor with a perpendicular blade set on a handle – essentially the first “hoe-shaped” safety razor. Henson’s razor had a guard along one edge of a replaceable blade, mounted at right angles to the handle (much like a modern hoe or a paint scraper). The design was meant to make self-shaving easier by putting the blade at a fixed angle against the skin. A similar idea was later refined and produced in the United States by the Kampfe Brothers, who patented a safety razor in 1880 with a wire guard and a removable (but not disposable) blade. These early safety razors still used blades that required stropping and honing, but they significantly reduced the skill needed – one could shave with less precision in angle and still avoid most cuts.
The true revolution in shaving, however, came at the turn of the 20th century with the concept of disposable blades. In 1901, an American entrepreneur named King Camp Gillette took out a patent for a safety razor that used inexpensive, thin stamped-steel blades meant to be discarded after a few uses. Gillette, working with engineer William Nickerson, found a way to mass-produce sharp blades cheaply and designed a lightweight double-edged razor to hold them. Introduced commercially in 1903 as the Gillette Safety Razor, this product was a game-changer. For the first time, men could shave themselves easily without needing to sharpen a blade – when the blade dulled, one simply inserted a new one. Gillette’s design had a protective guard and was double-edged (so each blade could be flipped and used twice). The product wasn’t an overnight success. In his first year Gillette only sold 51 razors and 168 blades. In his second year, however he sold 90,884 razors and 123,648 blades.
The reason for this success was shrewd marketing which emphasised convenience (“No Stropping, No Honing” promised one early advertisement) and targeted not only civilians but also the military. During World War I (1914–18), the US Army issued Gillette safety razors to millions of servicemen (3.5 million razors and 32 million blades were handed out in 1918 alone). This had a lasting impact: daily shaving became a requirement for soldiers (partly to ensure gas masks would seal, a lesson learned on the battlefields) and those soldiers carried the shaving habit home after the war.