Chapter 4 · 1910s–20s

The machine age

After Nessler's 1906 demonstration, a generation of inventors took up the hot wave and set to work on its faults: the burns, the hours, the danger. Between 1909 and 1924 a patent landscape took shape around the permanent-wave machine — controlled heaters, scalp protectors, timers, multi-head arrays — and the brass salon machine reached something like its mature form. The method itself did not change. Every machine of this generation still wound the hair in a spiral along a rod, and a spiral still demanded length. The bob was already arriving, and none of these machines could serve it.

The popular history tends to leap from Nessler in 1906 to the great brass chandeliers of the late 1920s as though nothing intervened. Two crowded decades of engineering lie between. Nessler had proved the principle — that an alkali applied under sustained electric heat could reshape the keratin — but his machine remained dangerous and slow. The prize for whoever could make the hot wave safer and faster was enormous, and the names that survive — Suter, Calvete, Rambaud, Bishinger — are the principal characters of that race. The patents they filed between 1909 and 1924 form the legal ground on which the later patent wars would be fought.

One word of caution. This generation is markedly less well-documented than Nessler himself. Dates of birth and death are often missing; nationalities are sometimes given differently in different sources; and several famous attributions rest on trade legend rather than a primary document. What follows states what can be verified plainly, and flags what cannot. The machine age is real; its exact biographies are, in places, irrecoverable.

The problem Nessler left

What Nessler bequeathed to the engineers was a result: a curl that survived washing. He bequeathed them, too, a set of difficulties severe enough to occupy twenty years of work. The apparatus was heavy and live. Each brass rod, projecting from the head like a horn, carried its own electrically heated tong, clamped by hand and held throughout heating. The countercurrent of warmth rising toward the scalp meant burns remained a constant hazard. The treatment took the greater part of a day, the client motionless beneath a frame of hot brass and current, the scalp irritated for days by the alkaline paste.

The prize was double. Whoever could make the hot wave safer — cut the burns, the scorching, the scalp damage — would take the trade from a hazardous specialist service into the ordinary salon. Whoever could make it faster — compress a six-hour sitting into two, or one — would multiply its profitability at a stroke. Every improvement of the next two decades aimed at one or both targets. None changed the third variable: the method itself. The spiral wind, with its dependence on long hair, remained the unchallenged architecture of the hot wave until 1924.

Nessler had answered the question the bronze foundries of the Nile could not — how to make a curl last. He bequeathed the next generation a different question: how to make a curl last without blistering the scalp, and without keeping the client in the chair from dawn to dusk.

The generation of machines

The names attached to the permanent-wave machine of the 1910s and 1920s are a small international roll-call: Suter, the Swiss hairdresser who gave the trade its most famous commercial system; Calvete, the engineer whose firm, Icall, actually built the machines; Rambaud, the Paris coiffeur who promoted the wave across France; and Bishinger, an American inventor whose later croquignole clamp belongs properly to Chapter 5. Each must be handled with care, because the popular record has fused, confused, and misattributed several of them.

timer heater (cross-section) root tip chandelier suspension scalp protector
Fig. 1. The mature permanent-wave machine as it stood by about 1920 — an overhead chandelier of counterweighted brass rods, each wound spirally with hair, with a felt or flannel protector between rod and scalp, and (inset) the differential tubular heater of Suter's 1917 patent, running two independent coaxial circuits so the coarser root hair could be heated longer than the finer tips. Still, emphatically, a spiral machine: Nessler's 1906 architecture refined, not overturned. (Author's schematic, after Suter US1,266,879A and period chandelier machines in the Science Museum Group and Historic England collections.)

Suter & Calvete: the London system

The most important commercial development of the decade after Nessler's patent came out of a London partnership between a Swiss hairdresser and a Spanish electrical engineer — Eugène François Suter and Isidoro Calvete. (Popular sources sometimes collapse the two into a single "Eugene Calvete"; this conflates Suter's trade name, "Eugene," with Calvete's surname, and no such person existed.) Suter was the hairdresser: a Swiss emigrant to the West End, he ran the salon that gave the system its brand. Calvete was the engineer: his firm, I. Calvete Ltd — trading as Icall — designed and manufactured the apparatus, from a London workshop founded in 1917.

What the pair contributed, and patented in Suter's name, was a refinement of the heater rather than of the wind. The patent — GB111372A, filed 28 December 1916 and granted 29 November 1917, with US1,266,879A following in May 1918 — describes two independent coaxial tubular heaters, switched in parallel, so the coarser hair near the scalp could be given longer heating than the finer tips. This differential heater became the basis of the recognisable salon machine: the brass chandelier of many rods, each carrying its own controlled heat, suspended above the seated client. By the early 1920s, machines of the "Eugene" system — built by Icall to Suter's order — were the salon standard across Britain and spreading across the continent.

Rambaud: the Paris promoter

The French contribution is more thinly documented, and the popular attribution requires a caveat. René Auguste Victor Rambaud (1887–1962), a Paris coiffeur and from 1908 secretary of the Paris hairdressers' trade union, is frequently credited with refining the machine for France and with an improvement known as the contre-courant, or "countercurrent." His biographical facts are well established: he opened a salon on the Rue Saint-Honoré in 1919 and became a prominent trade spokesman. The technical attribution is harder to verify. No primary French patent in his name has been located, and the scholarly literature — notably Steven Zdatny's work — places the first French-made machine, the Gallia, with Gaston Boudou around 1919, Rambaud its leading promoter rather than its inventor. The honest reading: Rambaud was a principal figure in the French adoption of the hot wave; the precise mechanical attribution is, in the present state of the record, unsupported.

Bishinger: a late and separate line

The fourth name warrants a correction. Robert Bishinger is often cited as a European inventor of the period, but the primary record places him in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania — the United States — and dates his single relevant patent (US1,718,025A, filed 1926, granted 1929) to years after our window closes. His patent describes a croquignole clamp with padded bases and a ratcheted wooden winding roller — a tool for the flat winding, not the spiral. Bishinger belongs to Chapter 5; the spiral-machine generation of 1909–1924 had no part of him, and he is named here only to remove him from the wrong chapter.

What actually improved

Between 1909 and 1924, the permanent-wave machine was the object of sustained engineering attention. What changed, concretely, was the apparatus around the wind — never the wind itself. Five lines of improvement stand out.

First, controlled heat. Nessler's tongs had been judged by hand and eye; the new machines held a more predictable temperature. This was achieved not by the bimetallic thermostats of later decades — those arrive only in the 1940s and 1950s — but by the steam-and-water phase-change ceiling of the early heater designs and by manual switching. Suter's 1917 differential heater was the most consequential step: two circuits let root and tip of each section be heated to different intensities, taming the worst scorching.

Second, scalp protection. The bare brass rod of Nessler's early machine had rested, with its countercurrent of rising heat, directly against the scalp; the mature machine interposed a felt or flannel protector, sometimes moistened, between rod and skin. (A discrete "scalp protector" named as such appears in the patent record only at the end of the 1920s, but the practice is visible in the early-1920s apparatus and is implicit in Nessler's own 1914 improvement, GB191408117A.)

Third, timing. The early operator judged by experience when each rod had heated long enough. The trade press of the late 1910s begins to describe mechanical timers fitted to the machine, allowing each heating to be clocked rather than guessed. The attribution of a single "first" timer patent is not cleanly settled; the improvement belongs, in the main, to the Icall workshop.

Fourth, the multi-head array. Nessler's 1909 suspension patent established one heater per counterweighted hanger; Suter's 1918 patent made the per-head heaters independently switchable; by the early 1920s Icall was manufacturing the recognisable chandelier of many rods — sometimes twenty or more — that allowed a whole head to be dressed at once.

Fifth, reduced unit count. The earliest Nessler practice used a great many small rods; the mature machine, with longer controlled heating per rod, could reduce the number needed for a full head, cutting weight on the scalp and the operator's clamping time. By the mid-1920s, an operator might dress a head with fourteen to twenty rods where an earlier practice had used thirty.

Every improvement of the machine age tamed Nessler's apparatus — its heat, its weight, its duration, its danger to the scalp. None of them touched the spiral wind at the machine's heart.

The patent thicket

Beneath the engineering lay a patent landscape that hardened, between 1909 and 1924, into a dense thicket. Nessler's foundational filings — the process patent GB190902931A ("A New or Improved Process of Waving Natural Hair on the Head," filed 6 February 1909) and the companion apparatus patent GB190920597A, both granted in February 1910, with American and continental family members (US1052166A, FR405664A, DE258690C) — defined the field. A rival American process patent, Paul E. Herrmann's US949272A (granted 1910), proposed a borax-and-acetic-acid variant and signalled the field was already contested.

What followed was a steady accretion of improvement patents. Nessler continued to file — GB191408117A in 1914, GB128340A in 1919, and American filings US1,400,370A (1921) and US1,481,109A (1924) — tightening the grip of the Nestle Patent Holding Company. Suter's GB111372A of 1917 and US1,266,879A of 1918 staked the differential heater. Around these clustered the smaller contributions of the trade: protector pads, timers, suspension refinements. By 1924 the permanent-wave machine was enclosed in a patent structure dense enough that any new entrant had to reckon with Nessler's process claims and Suter's heater claims alike.

This is the thicket the next decade would turn into a battleground. The patent wars of the late 1920s and 1930s — the subject of Chapter 6 — would be fought over the croquignole patents that arrived after 1924, but on ground prepared by fifteen years of spiral-machine filings. The machine age did not only refine the apparatus; it fenced it in.

1909–1924
London · Paris · Washington

The patent record accumulates a thicket around the permanent-wave machine. Nessler's process and apparatus patents of 1909–1910 define the field; his improvement patents of 1914, 1919, 1921, and 1924 tighten it. Suter's differential-heater patent of 1917 stakes the controlled-heat architecture the salon machine will use for a decade. By 1924, any new entrant must reckon with the Nessler and Suter estates before building a machine.

The unchanging limit

For all this ingenuity, the machine age did not solve the one problem that mattered most. Every apparatus described above — the controlled heaters, the scalp protectors, the timers, the chandelier arrays — was built around Nessler's spiral wind: a section of hair wound in a continuous spiral along the length of a rod, so that the rod ran through the curl like a core. The spiral wind demanded length. The dressed Edwardian hair of 1906 had supplied that length in abundance. The machine of 1924 was a far safer, faster, more controllable instrument than the machine of 1906 — but it still required the hair it served to be long.

This would have been a small limitation had fashion stood still. It did not. After the First World War, women across Europe and America cut their hair short — blunt, boyish, to the jawline or above — in the style called the bob. The bob was the defining hairstyle of the new era, adopted by millions, and the one hairstyle the spiral machine could not serve. The most fashionable women of the 1920s were, by a cruel irony, the very women the permanent-wave machine could not reach.

The demand for permanence did not contract with the bob; it exploded. Millions of bobbed women wanted the wave that the bob itself made unreachable, and the spiral machines of the machine age — however refined — could not give it to them. The resolution required not a better machine but a different idea: a winding that began not at the scalp but at the ends of the hair, wrapping the short lengths inward — the croquignole, or flat, winding. That idea, presented by Josef Mayer in 1924, is the subject of the next chapter. The machine age had carried the hot wave as far as the spiral would take it. The bob would force it the rest of the way.

Sources & further reading

See the machine taxonomy → — a cross-cutting sidebar that gathers the thermal-era apparatus (spiral and croquignole heaters, scalp protectors, timers, power) into one reference.