Sidebar · Patents & law

Patents & law

The chapters run along a chronological spine; the patent record does not. Once the croquignole flat winding reached the American salon, it set off fifteen years of litigation — a method patent and a heater patent pressed against manufacturers, then against thousands of operators, until the reissue RE 18,841 stood or fell on whether the croquignole was one man's invention or the trade's common property. This sidebar gathers that legal history. Read it with Chapter 5; the case-by-case detail lives on the Mayer memorial, maintained by the descendants.

A word of caution. Much of what survives is filtered through the litigation that destroyed the very patents it describes. Where a figure is anchored to a court record it is stated as such; where the record goes silent — above all on who bought RE 18,841 at the 1944 sale — the sidebar says so rather than filling the gap.

The estate

The American croquignole estate rested on two patents: a heater patent — an apparatus claim over the sleeve-shaped electric heater that slid over each wound packet — and the method patent that became RE 18,841, a reissue of Josef Mayer's earlier filings describing the flat sectioning, the integrated scalp-protector clip, the sealed moisture sachet, and the sectional sleeve heating as one process. The reissue is the patent the litigation turned on; the original grants (US 1,619,794; US 1,894,612; the earlier reissue US RE17,585) form its ancestry, and the European family (GB 251688A, FR 593464A, BE 335190A) stands alongside but outside the American campaign.

Two corrections to the legend are needed. Mayer held the patents as inventor; he did not build the American vehicle. The Cincinnati Realistic Permanent Wave Machine Company was founded by Philip D. Spaeth in 1925 — not by Mayer, whose relation to the American trade was that of a licensor. And the entity that pressed the patents in the courts — the Philad Company — is documented as the assignee through which enforcement was carried out. Whether that enforcement was aggressive to the point of abuse was a question the courts took up directly; it is not characterised here by a modern label the documented record does not bear. The full chain of title is the memorial's province.

The licensing campaign

What made the estate consequential was its reach. The Philad Company's enforcement was aimed at two audiences at once: the manufacturers who built croquignole machines, and — far more unusually — the salons that used them. A method patent is practised every time an operator winds a head the described way; treating each unlicensed salon as an infringer turned every croquignole perm in America into a potential cause of action.

The scale, as it reached the federal record, is documented in two figures, both attributed to the court records. In the 1932 Naivette litigation the trade was described as holding more than three thousand croquignole machines, with sums on the order of a million dollars at stake. By 1940 (National Hairdressers' and Cosmetologists' Association v. the Philad Company, 34 F. Supp. 264) the campaign reached roughly five thousand salons, across some fifty-seven cases, at about twelve dollars per salon a year and aggregate receipts around sixty thousand. These are the campaign's figures, describing the enforcement rather than the whole market. A twelve-dollar levy on an operation as ordinary as a perm was enough to organise the trade against it.

c.1930–1940
United States

The Philad Company presses the croquignole estate against manufacturers and individual salons alike — treating each unlicensed operator as a practiser of the patented method. By 1940: ~5,000 salons, ~57 cases, ~$12/yr per salon. A method patent, enforced at the chair, turns the ordinary perm into a royalty.

The cases

The litigation ran along a single arc: patents pressed, defences raised, the estate chipped at the edges, and finally the principal reissue held invalid.

1932 late 1930s 1940 1942 1944 Naivette v. Bishinger 6th Cir. · "father" rejected Misuse disputes Johnson Co. · Lechler National Hairdressers RE 18,841 held invalid Affirmed 3d Circuit Judicial sale RE 18,841 · purchaser unknown From a novelty defence to the invalidation of the principal method patent
Fig. 1. The croquignole cases, 1932–1944 — from Naivette v. Bishinger, where the Sixth Circuit rejected Mayer's paternity of the croquignole, through the late-1930s misuse disputes, to the 1940 class action that held RE 18,841 invalid, the 1942 affirmance, and the 1944 judicial sale. (Author's schematic, after the cited federal opinions.)

The hinge is 1932. In Naivette, Inc. v. Bishinger (61 F.2d 433, 6th Cir.) — which began by invalidating Robert Bishinger's croquignole clamp (US 1,718,025A) for want of novelty — the court did more than dispose of one rival patent. It explicitly rejected the claim that Mayer was "the father of the Croquignole wave." The croquignole wrap, the court found, had antecedents in the trade; Mayer had contributed the integrated system, not the bare winding. If the croquignole itself was not one man's invention, the method patent built upon it stood on narrower ground than its holders claimed.

Between 1932 and 1940 the disputes multiplied. Actions named in the secondary literature — a late-1930s suit by a manufacturer against the Philad Company, and a counter-action pressing a patent-misuse defence (the Johnson Co. and Lechler matters) — argued that tying licences to use of the method had overextended the patent's lawful scope. The full reporter citations for these intermediate cases are not cleanly established in the open record; they are named here by role rather than with a citation that cannot be verified. Patent misuse was a live defence in the 1930s salon trade, and it connects the early skirmishes to the decisive action.

That action was a class proceeding brought by the organised trade: National Hairdressers' and Cosmetologists' Association v. the Philad Company, 34 F. Supp. 264 (1940). It took up the validity of RE 18,841 directly — not a rival patent, but the principal method claim itself — and held the reissue invalid. In 1942 the holding was affirmed in the Third Circuit. With RE 18,841 gone, the architecture of the estate fell: the heater patent stood on narrower ground, and the method was no longer anyone's to license.

The 1932 court said the croquignole was not one man's invention. The 1940 court said the patent built on it was not, in law, a patent. By 1944 the reissue itself was for sale — its purchaser unrecorded.

The aftermath

What the invalidation meant for the trade was release. With RE 18,841 invalid and the heater patent shorn of its method claim, the croquignole winding passed into common use. An operator who had paid twelve dollars a year — or who had declined and risked suit — now owed nothing and feared nothing. The method Mayer had systematised and the Philad Company had enforced became, in a few years, simply the way a permanent wave was done.

The consequence was the opposite of what might be expected. The croquignole did not fade because its patents fell; it conquered because they did. Freed from licence and litigation, the flat winding spread across the American salon, and with it the croquignole heater that descends — through the cold wave, the acid perm, and every later chemistry — to the salon rod of the present day. The estate had fenced the method in for fifteen years; when the fence came down, the method belonged to everyone.

Two final caveats, where the record goes quiet. The 1944 judicial sale of RE 18,841 is documented as an event, but the purchaser and the precise character of the proceeding are not established, and it is not asserted here as an insolvency. And the later purchase of "The Realistic Company" by Revlon in 1960 is a documented brand lineage, but the chain of title from Mayer's patents to that brand is not proven, and is stated here only as a parallel history, not as a descent. The memorial carries what the family records show; the sidebar carries what the public record bears.

Sources & further reading

Scope. The cross-cutting legal reference for the permanent-wave history — the croquignole patent wars of the 1930s–40s, gathered rather than threaded through the chapters. It builds on Chapter 5, The bob and the flat winding, where the Mayer system and estate first enter the record, and on Chapter 4, The machine age, for the patent landscape of the preceding spiral generation. The full case-by-case history lives on the Mayer memorial; this sidebar condenses and funnels there. See also the machines sidebar for the apparatus side of the same era.