Richard BF

I have this rant that I pull out my backside every so often — well I have a lot of them actually, but this one in particular is a favourite — about how surely by now they would have invented the indefinitely sharp razor blade. The point of course is that the spare parts trade, the selling of disposable blades, would collapse over night.

The Gillette Company for example claim that they have 1.2 billion consumers each day, a fair majority I’m guessing are purchasing razor blades. They’re the guys who invented the 3 blade disposable razor by the way, which I’m sick and tired of telling people is a degree of magnitude more efficient than double blade razors. Are you listening Andrew? Gillette, in case you didn’t know, also own the Duracell battery brand.

Wilkinson Sword on the other hand, actually do make swords. But they also make razor blades and gardening equipment (under the brand Fiskars, which we don’t have in Australia, maybe because it sounds like fisters), and together with Schick, managed to nab the www.shaving.com domain name before anyone else did. Wilkinson Sword, Schick (named after Colonel Schick) and Fiskars are all brands of the Eveready Battery Company, who no longer make Eveready batteries, but serve as an umberalla company for these brands as well as their famous Energizer battery brand. Schick, by the way, are now bragging about inventing the first four blade disposable razor. Bit I digress…

So the rant goes like this, surely someone has patented the indefinitely sharp razor blade, and there’s a conspiracy amongst the blade manufacturers to keep it quiet and out of other companies’ hands, so they can keep on selling us disposable blades into eternity. You can take the conspiracy one step further if you like and suggest that they’re in cahoots with the cosmetics companies, who surely by now have invented the indefinitely dilapidating cream, but I’ll leave that one up to you to explore. So I went looking for razor blade patents, and boy was that… fun.

The first disposable safety razor was patented in 1904, by King C. Gillette (for his American Safety Razor Company, which was soon after renamed as Gillete), so they’ve had more than enough time to invent and forget. Anyway, there’s 257 U.S. patents with razor and blade in the title, so that doesn’t include patents pending, other countries, or where the title isn’t exactly indicative of its use. But the interesting thing is that this is only patents registered after 1976. Modern razor blade engineers have been busy!

Several months ago I spent a weekend reading pretty much every patent I could find on razor blades, and while there’s many thousands of ways to design and manufacture the head mounting and handle, there’s surprisingly few patents on a breakthrough chemical or metalurgical reconstruction of the actual blade. There’s a fair amount of blade patents, but nothing that gets close to the covetted holy grail of disposable blade shaving, the uber blade, the blade that will render the phrase “disposable razor” completely redundant.

Perhaps it is just too hard to construct the perfect blade? Now there’s a challenge for Gillette and Eveready. The perfect blade. Think of all the waste that would be saved. We tend to think that computers and technology will make the biggest change to the way we live, but friends, think of the indefinitely sharp razor blade, and a utopian world without unsightly body hair.