Thread: Thoughts On Country Of Origin

Hello Gentleman!
This thread is about country of origin, quality, and anything that might lend to a better understanding of what circumstances lead to the blades coming out of those countries.
Just want to know your thoughts.. not a bashing of different countries, but explanations that can help us understand why some places excelled in scale of production, quality, style.. etc. etc.
For example why were there so few manufacturers from Italy? America was a huge market, seems most American companies used German blades, trade deals?
Most French blades I see don't seem to have the same "fit and finish", I like French blades but why is it not as easy to find a "great" one?
How did the competition between Britain and France play out on the realm of shaving??

These are just a few ideas to help. I'm sure books could be written on the subject!

Let's see if we can get some of our valued historians to come out of the works and give what some of us really love to read... some rich history!
*Just imagine that there is a large group of men banging their shaving mugs on the table and waving frothy brushes and razors in the air chanting encouraging demands for some good history!* Hehehe

Thank you gentleman, have a great shave!

I am very partial to Swedish blades: easy to hone, smooth edges. Sweden is a small country but has or used to have mines producing high quality iron ore. Kindal in Paris sold a lot of Heljestrands in France. Mr C.V. Heljestrand is famous for his research into steel manufacturing. That may have contributed. Most Dutch used to use Solingen razors, Solingen not being far from the Netherlands. However my mother's uncle (the only man I have known who has shaved with straights his entire life (he died in the 80s of last century) preferred Heljestrand and as he travelled a lot to Sweden he had easy access to them.

Originally Posted by Kees

I am very partial to Swedish blades: easy to hone, smooth edges. Sweden is a small country but has or used to have mines producing high quality iron ore. Kindal in Paris sold a lot of Heljestrands in France. Mr C.V. Heljestrand is famous for his research into steel manufacturing. That may have contributed. Most Dutch used to use Solingen razors, Solingen not being far from the Netherlands. However my mother's uncle (the only man I have known who has shaved with straights his entire life (he died in the 80s of last century) preferred Heljestrand and as he travelled a lot to Sweden he had easy access to them.

Don’t forget Sweden’s history with knife making innareas like Mora. They are still favoured for economically priced, high quality working blades. I also believe Swedish steel was often used by high quality Japanese razor manufacturers.

Sorry Mike I am not a historian. The only thing I can add is some countries were more industrializes than others. They may have easy access to the raw materials needed. Craftsman were either from these countries or moved there. There were long apprenticeships to learn a trade. Countries like England, Germany and Sweden progressed faster than countries like Italy. I think these are the reasons why there are certain countries of origin for quality razors.
But this is only my opinion.

This is a good place to start!

The Cutlery Trades, by Godfrey Isaac Howard Lloyd.

It's dry as salt in outer space, but it brings the goods on the hows and wheres of the cutlery industry.

I can sort of summarize though.

Industrial production of cutlery really got its start in the beginning of the Renaissance.

From the very getgo, the limiting factor on production of goods was the production of steel. Large volume production of blister steel didn't begin until the early 1600's. The first places to make cementation furnaces were in Prague and Nuremberg, but it was the Germans who developed the largest cutlery trade first.

The cementation process of making steel was incredibly labor and time intensive. From iron bar to usable steel took 18 weeks, during which time the iron had to be constantly monitored and occasionally cut & welded. And this was the new, fast way!

That, of course, is the beginning of the western tradition of steel. South Asia had been producing high quality steel for much longer, and because of my focus on English razors, I know comparatively little about it except Alexander the Great was gifted superior quality steel.

Despite the fact that there were cementation furnaces in England, the German industry was the first major producer, likely because they were closer to the mines that produced the best ore. In Dannemora Sweden.

But by the early 1700's the merchant's guild of Solingen had driven prices on cutlery so low that the quality had suffered horribly, and Sheffield began taking up the slack. Things really kicked into high gear in the 1760's when Huntsman's crucible steel process took off.

Initially shunned by Sheffield producers, he sold a great deal of his steel to France. Enough so that there are a lot of English razors stamped 'Acier Fondu' (melted steel).

The story goes that the earliest cutlers settled in Sheffield were from Germany, which means by the dawn of the 19th Century (that is, 1800), what you're looking at is Swedish iron turned into English cutlery by German traditions.

For a long time Sheffield ruled the roost of steel production. Then in the 1850's Henry Bessemer stole an even better process from Robert Forester Mushet and radically changed the way steel was produced.

So much so that Karl Friedrich Ern in Germany could get enough high quality steel for his new mechanized cutlery production to begin making German cutlery that was still very cheap but also very good. By the 1880's, Solingen was beginning to eclipse Sheffield.

Up until then, cutlery production was heavily tied to place. For industrial scale production, at the beginning, the only power available was water, and that power was seasonal. Then came steam engines, but they still needed to import iron. Once high quality steel could be produced from local iron, using steam engines, things opened up more.

The major barrier to America becoming a large producer was simply because it wasn't a place where it had been done, but English and German immigrants filled that gap and by the beginning of the 20th century (that is, 1900), America had become the dominant producer of cutlery.

WWI changed the landscape again and ushered in widespread automation, pretty much anywhere anyone wanted it.

That's the basic shape of the story. The razors flowed out of the industry. Initially they required the highest quality metal and very skilled labor which few people even had the opportunity to learn because of how important location was.

But that story is the story of the 80-90% of the dominant goods. In fact, good cutlery (and hence razors) were produced all over the world, just in much lower volume and not necessarily for export.

Around 1800 there was C.F. Ponsbach in Sweden and Ignatz Roessler in Bohemia. Most razor folks are aware of the Swiss razors of Jaques Lecoultre.

That's just one edge of the puzzle though, because industry produces cultural goods, and what cultures want varies by time and place.

The idea of shaving is ancient and without any single source. Most of the cultures of antiquity engaged some sort of decorative or functional hair removal. Whether it was accomplished mechanically (with a sharp edge or tweezers) or chemically (orpiment).

I haven't done enough of the linguistic research to comment on that side yet, but there's a whole 'nother story to be told in who uses what words for the objects we call razors in English.

Complicating getting at any kind of real answer to this question -- one that's motivated me for years now -- is that there's a long period from the late Medieval period well into the Renaissance when razors were also surgical implements, because barbers and surgeons were often the same person. That and the fact that razors made before truly large scale steel production were necessarily expensive and uncommon.

So. My executive summary is: the further back you look, the more of a thing there has to have been for us to see it. Razors were, in fact, produced all over but in quantities too small to know about without lucky finds, so the story we know is automatically the story of the BIG industries, which were constrained by place and supply and therefore bottleneck in just a few places.

Regarding Iron and steel production you will probably find this of interest, I'm from at one time the largest Iron & Steel producing towns in the world Merthyr Tydfil South Wales.

Started as the MERTHYR FURNACE by Thomas Lewis of Llanishen in 1759. John Guest from Broseley in Staffordshire was appointed in 1767 and became a partner in 1782. After this time the Guest's influence progressed and by 1815 he dominated the company, with five blast furnaces produced 15,600 tons of pig iron. By 1823 with ten blast furnaces produced 22,287 tons of pig iron. In 1840 the works had 5000 employees. By 1845 Dowlais Ironworks was the biggest ironworks in the world, with 18 blast furnaces producing 88,400 tons yearly and 8800 employees. In the 1850s it took out the first license with Bessemer and Longsdon to use Henry Bessemer's process to produce steel. The first Bessemer steel was rolled there in 1865. The original Dowlais works at closed in the 1930s, but production continued at the Ifor Works until 1987.

Dowlais Iron & Steel Works

Now that's what I'm talking about!!! Wow!
I'm gonna need to read that a couple times.

It seems as though innovation, production, and other factors caused an "ebb and flow" in the steel and cutlery industries... empires rising up and falling and rising up again!

The scope of the history is more than a bit daunting especially if you take all of the other historical events of the time.

Thank you! That was a treat!

Originally Posted by MikeT

The scope of the history is more than a bit daunting especially if you take all of the other historical events of the time.

And ya gotta. Probably the major war with the least effect was, bizarrely, the war of 1812. Sheffield was loading ships with their finest cutlery before the governments had blotted the ink on the treaties.

Originally Posted by Voidmonster

And ya gotta. Probably the major war with the least effect was, bizarrely, the war of 1812. Sheffield was loading ships with their finest cutlery before the governments had blotted the ink on the treaties.

If you ever write a book on all of this, well on everything as deep as a 1000 page book can go on wet shaving and the grand scope of all concerned...

I want the leather bound special collectors edition.
Real sterling silver inlay print on the outside, perhaps some kind of "old world" style print, and pictures don't forget the pictures.

I feel like a "pretty please" is in order. Yes, with cherries on top.

EDIT: "Sterling Silver Bolsters"

I'm working on it with ScienceGuy.