Men everywhere have at some time or another had the pleasure of using a razor. Our ancestors, the cavemen, were early adopters of the hair removal idea and you can't go back much further than that. Since then the progress of the razor has been steady with a boom in the last one hundred years.

Based on cave paintings showing our early male ancestors with shaven facial hair, plus item found on Archaeological digs, lead historians to conclude the cavemen were shavers. The implements of shaving choice were sharpened sea-shells or flint to be scraped across the skin surface.

The first real razors, as we know them, were found in India and Egypt. These were copper and the year was 3000 BC. The wild Scandinavians were being buried with their razors. The items found in burial mounds were often ornately carved.

From then until the eighteenth century razor were just variations on this sharp blade theme. At times the practice of hair removal lost favor, but it always came back.

In the 18th century the Perret Razor was the first recognized attempt at a safety razor. It was still a fairly crude design but the L shaped wooden handle would encase the blade. The safety aspect of this was to prevent the blade going to deep into the skin. In England steel blades from Sheffield came to prominence. These were much sharper but had the disadvantage that went dull reasonably quickly.

In 1895 a Baltimore salesman called King Gillette developed the idea of a disposable razor blade. He then joined with an engineering expert to perfect the double edged blade. The blade was able to be cut from a template rather than needing to be forged. This allowed mass production to happen. Sales in a year went from almost zero to 90, 000 shaver and 123, 000 blades.

The next big invention had it roots in the First World War. Here an army Colonel, Schick, thought the principle of the repeating rifle could be applied to the razor. From this he invented the repeating razor with its blades stored in the handle. While the idea was good he thought he could do better and so sold the rights to this so he could fund the electric shaver.

Since then developments to the two main razors have been cosmetic, designed to improve the hair removal process, but in effect just tweaks on a good idea.