For Those Who Prefer a Buzz in the Morning

Schick Dry Shaver circa 1930.

I was never a fan.  I preferred a Gillette safety razor and with lather applied from a soap mug and boar’s bristle brush.  But my dad, who had a very light beard, was a devotee of the charms of the electric razor.  Although he used a Remington, like every other fan of the noisy contraption, he owned his morning ritual to Col. Jacob Schick who patented the Schick Dry Shaver on November 6, 1928.

Schick was born in 1878 in Ottumwa, Iowa but grew up in New Mexico where his father operated a coal mine.  By the age of sixteen he was managing the railway spur that served his dad’s mine and was showing his skill tinkering with and improving tools and equipment.

The adventuresome young man heard the siren call of war and enlisted in the Army for the Spanish American War.  He was sent to the Philippines.  He was commissioned a 2nd Lieutenant with the 1st Division 8th Army Corps.  He returned to the islands to serve from 1903 to 1905 with the 8th Infantry.  He contracted dysentery and was sent home.  It took a full year to recover and his health was permanently damaged.

When doctors suggested that a colder climate would be good for him, he transferred to the 22nd Infantry at Fort Gibbon in Alaska.  Schick displayed his engineering and organizational skill by helping lay out hundreds of miles of telegraph lines to the rugged Alaska interior.    

Enjoying the North, he resigned from the Army in 1910 to try his hand at prospecting for gold in Alaska and British Columbia.  On one expedition, he injured his ankle and had to stay alone in camp for days as his companions pushed on.  While laid up, he found trying to shave in the cold uncomfortable and began to tinker with ideas for “dry shaving” using an electrical motor connected to a vibrating shaving head by a cable.  He drew crude sketches of his idea and submitted them to several manufacturers who rejected the clumsy apparatus.

Before he could develop the project more, Schick returned to the Army.  He served in Britain during World War I but his continuing health problems prevented assignment to the front in France.  Instead he finished out the war as a Lieutenant Colonel in Washington in charge of the Division of Intelligence and Criminal Investigation.

After leaving the service in 1919, Schick turned to his obsession for developing his dry shaving idea.  But he needed capital.  He had another marketable idea in the shaving realm—a way in inserting razor blades directly into a holder from a spring loaded, closed clip similar to the ones that injected rounds of ammunition into a rifle, and thus avoiding the cut fingers that routinely occurred using Gillette’s safety razor blades.  He called this invention the Magazine Repeating Razor and formed a company to produce them in 1925.  The invention slowly began to catch on and within a few years was selling briskly.

Meanwhile, Schick continued to work on his electric dry shaver.  By the late ‘20’s he had found away to eliminate the separate motor and cable and have a small motor in the same unit with the head and which could be held easily in one hand.  He obtained a patent but to obtain the funds to build a production plant, he sold his razor company to American Chain & Cable Company.  The dry shaver was on the market in 1929 and in 1939 Schick incorporated his new company as Schick Dry Shaver Inc.  Thus the two shaving products invented by Schick are to this day sold  under his name but marketed by two totally different successor companies.

The Depression was a tough time to launch such a new business.  His wife was forced to mortgage her family home to keep the factory open.  But by the mid-1930 the electric razor had captured a significant niche of the shaving market as improved models were introduced.

In 1936 Schick moved to Canada for his fragile health.  He died there the next year after kidney surgery.  His wife and children inherited the shaver company.

Today Schick razors are owned by the holding company built around Energizer Batteries.  Schick electric shavers are marketed by the Norelco division of Phillips.  The shavers are manufactured abroad, but Norelco has its U.S. Headquarters in Stamford, Connecticut where Col. Schick operated his factory.

Nova Scotian Lit World, Saved the Whales—Naturally Americans Never Heard of Him

Whole worlds rise and fall on small things.  On March 27, 1854, for example, Abraham Gesner, a physician and geologist, patented Kerosene. 

Born in 1797 Nova Scotia to an influential family, he first took up the career at sea that lured many in the maritime north.  Shipwrecked twice before his twenty-first birthday, he turned to medicine and traveled to London to study with top British physicians at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital.  A chance encounter with geologist Charles Lyell sparked an interest in that science. 

Returning to practice in Halifax, Gesner spent his spare time conducting geologic surveys.  In 1836 he published his study of Nova Scotian mineralogy and identified coal and iron deposits that opened new economic opportunities. 

Impressed, neighboring New Brunswick hired him as Provincial Geologist.  He did discover more resources, including a unique form of natural asphalt that he named Alberlite.  Coal and alberlite had the potential for making the Provinces wealthy.  But their location, far removed major markets, made transportation of the heavy, bulky minerals expensive. 

Gesner threw himself into the work of somehow transforming the raw materials into something more portable.  By 1846 Gesner had developed a process to distill a liquid fuel from coal, which he called Kerosene.  The oil burned cleaner, produced a brighter light, and was cheaper than other common lamp oils, particularly whale oil. 

Hunting the sperm whale for its oil was one of the chief industries of New England and of the Maritime Provinces.  But half a century of intensive whaling was cutting deeply into the sperm whale population and driving up prices. 

Gesner was quick to bring his new product to market.  In 1848 he founded the Kerosene Gas Light Company and obtained a contract from the city of Halifax for street lighting which demonstrated the usefulness of the new fuel.  By 1854 Gesner was opening operations in the United States with his new North American Kerosene Co. based on Long Island. 

New Brunswick coal interests blocked Gesner’s use of coal for his new product, so he developed a process to distill coal oil from alberlite.  The coal companies went back to court and argued that the natural asphalt was just a form of coal.  With his supplies of raw material limited and demand for his product growing, Gesner was in a tight situation.

 Despite his clear claim, Gesner did not get around to getting a patent on his process until 1854 when his Long Island plant was ready to go into production.  By that time Scottish chemist James Young had developed another process for distilling Kerosene from liquid petroleum, which he called Paraffin oil and obtained his own patents in Britain and the United States.  Although Young’s product was inferior to Gesner’s, the Canadian was forced to pay Young royalties, even though his process was different. 

Gesner’s business really took off from that point.  In a very few years kerosene had completely replaced the whale oil for illumination in North America—not a moment too soon for the shrinking sperm whale population, and an economic disaster for once thriving whaling ports like New Bedford, Massachusetts. 

In 1859 Col. Edwin Drake opened the Pennsylvania oil fields making petroleum available in industrial quantities at a low price for the first time.  American inventors like Samuel Martin Kier devised processes to distill kerosene and patented lamps to burn it.

Despite the new competition Gesner’s product, which he sold under the exclusive trade mark of Kerosene, dominated the market until he sold his businesses to the emerging Standard Oil Trust which then marketed both the fuel distilled from coal tar and from petroleum under that name.

Gesner returned a very wealthy man to Nova Scotia where he ended his days happily as Professor of Natural History at Dalhousie  University.  He died in 1864. 

Kerosene’s days as the primary illuminator were numbered, however.  By the 1870 big cities were converting to natural gas for lighting.  Soon after, Edison introduced his electric lamp, the dynamo, and a distribution network.  Kerosene, however, still lit rural homes in North America until wide spread rural electrification began in the 1930s.  It continues to be a primary fuel for lighting and cooking in much of the remote Third World.

Today it is familiar to consumers as oil for camping lanterns and as fuel for portable cooking stoves and space heaters.   Most people do not realize that jet fuel is essentially a form of kerosene. 

Virtually unknown in the U.S., Gesner is honored as a hero in Canada.  A monument was erected in 1933 by the Imperial Oil in Halifax’s Camp Hill Cemetery to honor Gesner’s roll as “The Father of the Petroleum Industry.”  In 2000 the Canada Post  issued a commemorative stamp in his honor.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  

Oh Crap! You Mean it Ain’t True?

It is the sad duty of your obedient servant, this blogger who covers historical events and personages both great and small, to occasionally disabuse you of your most cherished illusions.  

Like this one:  The standard flush toilet was invented by Sir Thomas Crapper in the Britain in the 19th Century, lending his name to the product of human solid waste disposal on account of his name being emblazoned on his products.

Wrong on two or three major counts, but containing the kernel of truth.  

On the other hand the self-appointed myth busters who claim that the whole thing is a lie and that there never was a Thomas Crapper are also wrong.

The very real Thomas Crapper was baptized on September 28, 1836 in Thorne, Yorkshire. The exact date of his birth is unknown, but babies were typically christened about two weeks after birth.  He was apprenticed to his older brother George as plumber. After  completing his training  and spending three years as a journeyman, he set up his own first shop near his brothers Chelsea establishment in West London in 1861.

In addition to plumbing services Crapper advertised himself as a sanitary engineer and a brass foundry man.  He began manufacturing plumbing fixtures and obtained several patents that improved the already existing flush toilet.

The ancient Romans had continuously flushing toilets in their elaborate baths and in villas of the extremely wealthy.  The Dark Ages, however, had pretty well wiped out memory of them. 

Elizabethan courtier Sir John Harington was credited with a developing a flush toilet called The Ajax around 1596 which had a water shut off device.  The clever devise became the object of political controversy when Harington wrote a book about it, A New Discourse upon a Stale Subject: The Metamorphosis of Ajax in which he also satirized one of the Queen’s favorites resulting his banishment from court and the languishing of his invention.

Alexander Cumming obtained a patent on an improved flush toilet in 1775.  In 1778 Joseph Bramah obtained a patent on an improvement that replaced Cumming’s slide valve at the bottom of the tank with the familiar flap valve still seen in most toilets. By the late 18th Century water closets, as they were called, were being manufactured and installed in the homes of the wealthy.

Edward Jennings got another patent for further improvements on the flush toilet in 1851.  Thus when Thomas Crapper began producing and marketing his own water closets, he was joining an already established line of business.

In the 1880’s Crapper got the distinction of having Royal Warrants when he won a contract to install several Thomas Crapper & Company water closets in the country seat of Prince Edward.  He also supplied Edward as king and his successor, George IV.  The prestige boosted the sales of his appliances.

But Crapper did hold several patents, including two for key improvements.  The Silent Valveless Water Waste Preventer was actually invented by Albert Giblin 1898 who was either an employee of Crapper or from whom the manufacturer obtained a license.  Crapper also held a patent, probably invented by his nephew on the ballcock or float valve that automatically closed the flap valve of the supply tank when the siphon filled it with water.

Taken together, these improvements made the familiar flush toilet that can still be seen and used throughout Britain—an over-head, wall mounted reservoir tank whose flush mechanism is engaged by a pull chain releasing water through a pipe into the bowl below.  These models were proudly emblazoned with the badge of Thomas Crapper & Sons.

Thomas retired in 1904 and died in 1910.  He was a respected businessman but was never knighted.  The company passed into the hands of his brother and nephew.  Under a succession of owners it continued to produce Thomas Crapper toilet until 1966.

The legend that World War I Doughboys popularized the term crap for excrement based on seeing Crapper’s name on their facilities make so much sense that it is hard to deny.  But entomologists trace the use of the term as far back as the 1840’s when it first appeared in print.  It was probably in casual slang usage long before that.  Experts believe that it derives from the Old Dutch and German krappe for a “vile and inedible fish” and the Middle English crappy.  Still, it is hard to believe that Crapper’s name, ubiquitous on British porcelain, did not at least contribute to the popularization of the term.

Whatever the case, be grateful for you comfortable indoor plumbing facilities which whisk away your waste to a distant treatment facility.  Life would truly be full of crap without it.