The Machine Perm Era

The haircut that broke the machine

The permanent wave arrived just in time to be made useless. The early systems assumed Edwardian hair and a spiral wind that needed a long run of hair to climb along the rod — the method on Nessler and the first perm. Then women cut it off. Bob, then shingle, then Eton crop, inside about five years. A service that had only just become possible could no longer grip.

The scale of the haircut is worth stating with numbers, because it explains the panic in the trade press. A Washington Post piece of 1925, “Economic Effects of Bobbing”, counted about 5,000 hairdressing shops in the United States in 1920 and roughly 21,000 by the end of 1924. Denver Public Library puts the figure above 40,000 by 1930. An eightfold expansion in a decade, on the back of a haircut.

Some hairdressers refused to cut short and lost the work to barbers, who had no such scruples and no permanent wave to protect. The rest faced a straightforward technical problem: how do you wave six inches of hair on a machine designed for thirty?

A service is only ever as viable as the haircut in fashion. That has not stopped being true, and it is why I ask what you intend to do with your length before I discuss anything else.

Point winding: the wrap that fixed it

The answer was worked out in the mid-1920s and it was known in the trade as point winding at least as often as croquignole. It simply reversed the direction of travel. The ends are gripped first and rolled back towards the scalp, each turn lying over the last, the rod perpendicular to the head rather than standing out from it. A short bob can circle a rod two and a half times even when it cannot run along one.

The chemist J. Bari-Woollss put the difference in 1934 in a way nobody has improved on. A point winding, he wrote, is almost two-dimensional, like the spring of a watch; a root winding is three-dimensional, like a helix. Point winding gives more curl, and heat takes longer to reach the core of the thicker bundle.

Read that second clause again, because it is the whole practical problem of the era in one sentence. The wind that saved the industry also made the hair harder to heat evenly, which is exactly the kind of trade every technical decision in this field turns out to be.

That is also this library’s central claim, stated by a working chemist ninety years ago and then largely forgotten by the people selling lotion. With one change of geometry, every machine already standing on a salon floor could serve the largest new market in the history of hairdressing. The chemistry did not move. The wind did. The technique as it is used now is on the croquignole wrap, and how a head is actually laid out, pattern by pattern, is on the straight-set wrap.

Josef Mayer, the patent, and what the court actually found

The name attached to the croquignole wrap is Josef Mayer, a hairdresser of Karlsbad, then in Czechoslovakia and now Karlovy Vary, and that much is verifiable from the documents. United States reissue 18,841, “Hair Waving Method”, names him and describes hair “wound from their free ends toward the scalp, turn upon turn, upon a curler”. It was filed in March 1925 with a 1924 priority date and assigned to the Philad Company of Cleveland, Ohio.

What happened next is left out of the trade histories entirely, and it is the best story in this whole period.

Philad spent the late 1930s collecting royalties on croquignole from salons directly — not from machine makers, from hairdressers. Time reported in February 1941 that the company had been taking at least 80,000 dollars a year from manufacturers and was by then demanding twelve dollars a year from effectively every beauty shop in America. A licence fee for winding hair towards the scalp. The National Hairdressers’ and Cosmetologists’ Association sued.

I include this partly because it is a good story and mostly because it is a working lesson in attribution. When a supplier tells you who invented something, they are usually telling you who filed first, who marketed hardest, or who is still selling. Those are three different men, and none of them is necessarily the fourth, who is the one the court found.

It also tells you something about the value of the wind, which is the argument this library keeps making. Nobody litigates for eighty thousand dollars a year over a bottle of borax. They litigate over the geometry, because the geometry is what makes the shape.

The chandelier, and twenty-two heaters on one head

By the early 1930s waving was a hardware industry. The standard object was a wheeled pedestal carrying a ring of suspended heaters — the chandelier — whose whole purpose was to take the weight of the metal off the client’s head and hold it in a fixed relationship to her scalp. Everything about the machine follows from the fact that hot metal is heavy and skin is not.

A full head might take up to twenty-two heaters in a single sitting. They were not all the same. Tubular heaters suited a spiral wind, sitting over a rod that stood out from the head; the flatter croquignole type clipped over a point winding like a bulldog clip. A machine of the period commonly carried both, in a mixed set, because a salon could not know in advance what would walk through the door.

The largest capital item in the building, then, was a device whose fitness for purpose depended on next season’s haircut. That is a bad position for a salon owner and a very good one for a manufacturer, and the trade spent the decade discovering which of those two facts mattered more.

The British side of that hardware trade — the firms, the engineers, the trade press they invented — is substantial enough to have its own page, on Eugene and the British trade. In America, Marjorie S. Joyner of Chicago was granted United States patent 1,693,515 for her own waving machine on 27 November 1928, having filed that May. She went on to advise some two hundred Madam C. J. Walker beauty schools and later helped write Illinois’s first cosmetology laws, which makes her the rare figure in this history who shaped the training and the regulation as well as the equipment.

Several further waving systems of this period circulate in hair histories on the strength of a single family archive reproduced in one book. They are not named here. A machine that exists in one source is a machine I cannot show you.

Sachets, and the birth of the consumable

The commercially decisive product of the era was not a machine at all. It was a sachet: a small absorbent pad holding the reagent, backed with foil or vegetable parchment, dipped in water and wound rapidly round the curler. The reagents were mildly alkaline, borax and ammonia the ones named most often.

Sachets saved winding time, which salons wanted, and they were used once and thrown away, which manufacturers wanted very much indeed. About twenty went on a head, and the trade magazines of the period told their readers a genuine wave took two dozen — a claim that was simultaneously a technical instruction and an order form.

A machine is sold once. A sachet is sold every time a client sits down.

That sentence is the whole commercial history of this trade in miniature, and it is why your perm is priced the way it is today. End papers, single-use lotion and neutraliser sachets, foils — all direct descendants, all still on the bill, all still bought by the box. End papers covers what the modern version actually does, which is more than you would guess from the price.

The sachet also quietly moved the chemistry out of the salon’s hands. When the reagent arrives pre-dosed in a sealed pad, the hairdresser stops mixing and starts following. That is a genuine safety gain and a genuine loss of judgement at the same time, and the trade has been arguing about that trade ever since — most recently about pre-mixed activator bottles.

What it was like, from people who were there

Period accounts are unflattering and remarkably consistent. Billie Jones Kanan’s record of a 1928 visit to a midwestern beauty shop, held by the Wisconsin Historical Society, says it took all day, that her hair was wound so tightly she thought she would never blink again, and that it steamed until tears ran down her cheeks and her scalp was scalded.

Breakage was common enough to have a nickname. It was called the pocket perm, after where the broken lengths went. The dominant memory in these accounts is not noise but heat, steam and smell — wet sachets coming up to temperature under foil, ammonia, and hair being cooked.

And people queued for it. The narrator of E. M. Delafield’s Diary of a Provincial Lady, published in 1930, undergoes a permanent wave “with customary interludes of feeling that nothing on earth can be worth it, and eventual conviction that it was”. I have never read a better description of a texture service, and I have been giving them since 1991.

The economics behind the queue

By 1930 most middle-class women had their hair set weekly and permed roughly every three months, as new growth pushed the wave down the length. One high-ticket service a quarter underwrote a weekly low-ticket visit, with a consumable sold on every perm. No other service in the building had that shape, which is why the perm was the backbone of the interwar salon rather than its showpiece.

That model is the reason the trade tolerated a machine it privately disliked, and it is also the reason the machine was so vulnerable. A business built on quarterly repeat can be taken apart by anything that makes the quarterly service cheaper, faster or less frightening, and within a decade all three arrived at once.

How the machine era actually ended

Most accounts have the cold wave killing the machine. It did not, or not first. By the time room-temperature chemistry took the market, the electrical waving machine had already been beaten commercially by something much less famous: a small sealed paper pad that made its own heat, needed no wires and no mains supply, and let the client sit in an ordinary chair. That is the hinge in this history and it has its own page, on machineless perms.

Then the war stopped equipment production across Europe in 1939 and the manufacturing base never came back, and the cold wave finished what the pad had started. Three separate blows inside about fifteen years, in that order, and the popular histories record only the last one.

What the era left behind is not hardware. It is the wind, the vocabulary and the commercial shape of the modern salon.

If you want the one fact from this page that changes how you read a supplier’s claims: the chemistry barely moved between 1920 and 1935, and results changed completely anyway. It was the wrap that did it. Which is why, when a client asks me what lotion I am going to use, the honest answer is that the lotion is the smaller half of the question — and whether the hair can take any of it is a larger question than either.

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