Thread: Straight razor history

Ah, there's another part of your original question that I missed. You asked about early razor manufacturing in the 18th century.

This book is an excellent source of information on the subject. (But it's a long, slow read through dry, dry text)

France and England produced the most cutlery in the 18th century. During that period, the Solingen cutlery guilds were dying out under tremendous pressure from the mercantile class and wouldn't really stage a comeback until the early days of automation, in the late 1850's and early 1860's.

French production was spread around through many areas, and done very much as a cottage industry, but with a huge number of cottages. English production was centered around London (which was fading by 1700), Birmingham and Sheffield.

It's also useful to know that the great majority of the steel that was used throughout Europe came from Sweden. It was usually refined locally, but the raw ore came from (nearly exclusively!) Dannemora mine. Some was imported from India, a little from America and a little from Russia. There was one point in the mid 1800's when Germany imported Swedish ore refined in Sheffield!

But in the early 1700's, the cutlery trade was dominated by the guild system, and the guild mandated the number of apprentices any master could take.

A typical Sheffield cutler's hut was a small stone building with paper windows, closed to the outdoors, possibly with a wheel powered by a stream.

It was brutal work. From the initial forging which had men hoisting 90 pounds of molten steel out of a furnace in the floor, their watered leather steaming in the heat, to the constant grinding, there were a lot of ways to die young.

By the later 1700's, more factory process came into play and masters hired teams of men to work in larger workshops or 'wheels' (at least that's what the English called them). Documentation from that far back is scanty, but the Cutler's Company of Hallamshire (the Sheffield guild) kept a lot of records that were assembled into an enormous doorstop in the early 1900's. Here in the second volume, you can find lists of many of the early cutlers.

Starting around 1787, you can start finding information in trade directories like Gales & Martin.

As a general rule of thumb, for much of the 1700's, the French made better razors than anyone else.

Unfortunately, this is a pretty incomplete picture because I've had to piece it together from sources like Lloyd's history. I'm certain there was production in Spain -- I've seen pictures of beautiful 18th century Spanish razors -- but he makes no mention of it. I know that Chinese barbers used Spanish razors in the barbershops of Mexico City in 1635, but I know almost nothing about those razors. The Spanish administrators of the city even passed laws limiting the number of razors Chinese barbers could own because they were out-competing the Spanish barbers (it didn't help).

I know nothing about the history of razors in Russia, or China or Japan, but I'm certain they were made in there.

There's an incredible amount of terra incognita in the history of razors, and a lot of stories that sound great but probably contain little truth. Museums get these details wrong. History books, compendiums, experts, and especially people like me make mistakes or latch onto a detail that turns out to be wrong.

For a long time, the co-founder of Wade & Butcher was assumed to be an American because one early source described him as an American businessman, it turns out that instead he was a businessman who worked in America, but was most definitely born in Sheffield.