Nessler and the First Perm

1906 and 1909, and why the gap matters

Two dates in this story can be supported, and they are not the same event. On 8 October 1906 Karl Nessler demonstrated a permanent waving method to an invited audience of leading London hairdressers. On 6 February 1909 he filed two British patents, one covering the process and one the apparatus, as Charles Nessler trading as Nestle and Co.

Other years circulate freely — 1905 and 1911 both appear in print — and I am not going to arbitrate them. What is worth your attention is the gap between the two dates I can support, because it tells you something true about how new services actually arrive.

A demonstration is a claim. A patent is a description precise enough that a stranger could build the thing and a court could rule on it. Between the two sits the work nobody writes about: making a process repeatable, making it survivable, and making it explicable to somebody who was not in the room. The 1906 audience saw a method. The 1909 documents describe a product. Those are different achievements and the second one is much harder.

The demonstration is when it was shown. The patent is when it was finished. Three years is roughly right, and anyone selling you a technique that went from idea to salon in a season is describing marketing.

The gap matters for a second reason, which is what filled it. The 1906 demonstration went down badly. Nessler’s early attempts barely registered in the professional press, and his contemporaries were unimpressed — plausibly because the hairdressers in that room could see, immediately, a service that brought a client back twice a year instead of once a week. The trade’s first reaction to the permanent wave was not wonder. It was arithmetic.

Those three years were also spent on the thing the demonstration had exposed. The method as first shown was not survivable enough to sell, and the person who proved that had already paid for it. I will come to her.

A cobbler’s son from the Black Forest

Karl Ludwig Nessler was born in Todtnau, high in the Black Forest, on 2 May 1872, to a cobbler. He apprenticed as a barber and then moved — Basel, Milan, Geneva, Paris, and in 1901 London. By the time he reached here he had worked in four countries, which is worth holding on to, because almost everything he did afterwards was the work of a man who had watched the same trade run four different ways.

He was christened Karl Ludwig Nessler and traded in London as Nestle and Co, the name that appears on both of the 1909 patents. Why he used it, what happened to the firm, and why it has nothing whatever to do with the Swiss food company are all on Nessler and Nestle, because they are a business story rather than a technical one and they deserve their own room.

What belongs here is a single point about the inventor rather than the businessman. He was not a chemist and he was not an engineer. He was a working hairdresser who had spent years on a problem the trade had already decided was insoluble, and the solution he arrived at was mechanical rather than chemical. That is why the first permanent wave is a machine and not a bottle. It took another thirty years and a wool laboratory in Leeds before anyone made the shape stay without heat, and that story is on the cold wave.

What came before him was not nothing. Hot irons had been producing waves that lasted until the next wash since the 1870s, and the trade that grew up around them is on before the perm. Nessler’s claim is narrower and larger at the same time: not the first wave, but the first wave that outlived a shampoo.

Brass, current and counterweights

A vertical stand carried a circular overhead fitting from which the heaters hung on wires — the shape that gave these machines their nickname, the chandelier. Roughly a dozen curlers went on a head, about two pounds each across most accounts, which puts close to twenty pounds of hot metal above one client. One source says three to four pounds each and calls them bronze rather than brass; either way, the number is large enough that the engineering problem it created is the first thing the patent addresses.

That is why the counterweights existed: to keep the weight off her neck and the metal off her skin. Nessler’s 1909 apparatus patent describes exactly that — a counterbalancing device with hinged arms and hooks, so that each heater’s point of suspension could be moved independently. Read it as what it is. The apparatus patent is not mostly about heating hair. It is mostly about holding several pounds of hot brass in a fixed relationship to a living head for six hours.

Sources conflict on how the earliest machines were heated. Most accounts, and the patents themselves, describe electrical heating; at least one reference work states that the first machine used gas, with electricity following. I cannot resolve it and I am not going to pick. What is not in dispute is that by 1909 the process was electrical, arriving in step with commercial electricity becoming ordinary in London — which is itself part of why the service was confined to a small number of premises for a long time. A salon that wanted to perm needed a supply most buildings did not yet have.

The spiral wind, and why it needed Edwardian hair

The wind was a spiral. Each section was wrapped around a rod standing out from the head, turn on turn along the rod, working away from the scalp — the geometry of a spiral staircase. The period name for the whole method was the spiral heat method, and it was only ever useful on long hair, because a spiral needs a long run of hair to climb.

That constraint defines the era completely. Edwardian women had hair to the waist and a spiral wind is the only sensible way to handle that length. When the bob arrived after the war the spiral became impossible on most heads, and the trade had to invent a different geometry — the croquignole, wound from the ends back towards the scalp, which is the subject of the machine perm era and, as a live technique, of the croquignole wrap.

Nessler’s method did not fail. His clients cut their hair off.

The spiral perm is still the right answer on long hair, and it is chosen for exactly his reason: past a certain length, winding along the rod is the only wind that behaves. He did not discover a fashion. He discovered a geometry, and geometry does not go out of date.

What the machine actually did, and what nobody can prove

The record here is much thinner than the retellings suggest, so it is worth separating what is documented from what is inferred.

Documented. The hair was moistened with a lotion and held at around 100°C or more for an extended period. Nessler’s 1909 process patent describes wrapping the wound curler in moist flannel, applying a lotion, then heat — and it names no chemical at all. He kept the formula secret. Popular accounts routinely name caustic soda, and one widely repeated claim has his earliest experiments using cow urine. Neither is well sourced, and caustic soda in particular is easily back-projected onto 1906 from the later chemistry of relaxers. What the trade literature does record, once the method spread, is hairdressers working with mildly alkaline reagents — borax and ammonia named most often, carried in a moist pad or paste against the wound curler.

That move to a buffered alkaline paste is the period’s most important safety change and it is almost never mentioned. Borax is a weak base with real buffering capacity. It will not run away with itself the way a strong caustic will, which matters enormously when the operator has no way to measure what is happening under the flannel.

Inferred, from what hot alkali is known to do to keratin. Water and heat break hydrogen bonds and let the fibre take a new shape, but that alone washes out at the next shampoo — that is a set, not a perm. Alkali swells the fibre, lifts the cuticle and, at high pH and high temperature, attacks the disulphide cross-links that make a shape permanent. Hot alkali also breaks peptide bonds, which is why over-processed hair of this period did not simply go limp. It parted under low load, and it parted at the point of greatest tension, which was the rod.

Burns were a real risk and the record on that is unusually clear, because the first subject was Katharina Laible, later his wife. His first two attempts on her burned her hair off and blistered her scalp. She married him anyway, and she lost her hair to his invention before anybody else in the world had the chance to.

I put that in every version of this page I write, and not for the anecdote. The whole of my working caution about heat plus chemistry is contained in it. Heat speeds a reaction and it also removes your ability to see where the reaction has got to. When a client asks me for something hotter or stronger because she wants the curl to last longer, this is the road she is asking to be put on, and the honest answer is that the extra strength buys weeks of curl and costs months of condition.

Six hours, and the shape of the service

Six hours is the figure most accounts give for a full head; one modern article puts it nearer ten. Either way the client sat still, under weight, under heat, near steam, for most of a working day. Where a salon owned only a few heaters — and most owned few, because they were the largest capital item in the building — the head could not be done in one pass at all. It took more than one sitting, days apart, with half a head waved and half not in between.

The wave was said to last around six months, which is the only part of the offer a modern client would still recognise. Everything else about it has gone.

I cannot give you a verified London price for the Edwardian service and I am not going to invent one, because a number in a history page gets quoted for thirty years. What can be described without a number is the shape of the market, and the shape is severe: a full day of a stylist’s time, a machine needing an electrical supply most premises did not have, and hair long enough to spiral. That is a small and wealthy clientele by construction, and it stayed that way until the geometry changed and the hardware got cheaper. The one price I can cite comes later and from New York, and it sits on the company page where it belongs.

There is one more thing worth saying about six hours, because it is the constraint that has driven every development in this field since. Client patience is a design variable, and it is the least negotiable one in the building. Six hours bought a wave in 1909. A modern client will not sit for two. Every faster system since — the croquignole, the self-heating pad, the cold wave, the digital machine — has been chasing that number down, and each one bought its speed with something. Knowing what each generation paid is the only useful way to judge a service sold to you on speed alone.

What survives, and what does not

Nothing you can book descends from Nessler’s method. No service and no product on a modern menu traces to it, and that is unusual: most of this library is about techniques still in daily use. What survives here is indirect, and it has turned out more durable than the hardware would have been.

The last point is the one I would want a client to take away. Nessler invented the category and then lost it, twice, to things that had nothing to do with hairdressing — a war and a stock market. The people who made the real money out of permanent waving industrialised it after him, and the technique that made them rich was not his. That second half is the machine perm era, and the business half is Nessler and Nestle. Whether any of this is something you can have done today is a different question again, and it starts on can your hair take a perm.

Questions