Bend, Don’t Break

Today in Tedium: Modern hair combs are unusually simple tools—perhaps our simplest. Their single row of bristles, usually black, are designed to do one thing—separate and organize your hair follicles into a more attractive format. They do this effectively, without the need of any electricity. And they’re cheap, too—you never have one when you need one, but you can buy a pack of 72 of them for eight bucks, or 11 cents each. But even these simple devices carry an air of mystery. Specifically: Why does my comb need to announce itself as “unbreakable”? Does it matter these days? And, of course, has anyone successfully broken one? Tonight’s Tedium ponders the mystery of the unbreakable comb. — Ernie @ Tedium

A most appropriate Christmas gift. (Brooklyn Daily Eagle)

The original “unbreakable” comb was made of rubber

Here’s something curious about Charles Goodyear, the inventor of vulcanized rubber: If you’re not reading closely, you might get confused about his lineage and his record of success.

Goodyear died nearly 40 years before the big-name tire manufacturer that bears his name was even created. (In fact, Goodyear’s longtime competitor BFGoodrich actually has stronger historic ties to Goodyear, as that company merged with Goodyear’s company.)

And while there was a prominent industrialist named Charles W. Goodyear who came to prominence in the late 19th century, the vulcanized rubber inventor was not a member of that family.

Nonetheless, though, the inventiveness of Charles Goodyear proved a turning point in American history, not just for combs, but for manufacturing. His 1843 discovery of the vulcanization process, which cured and toughened rubber in ways that made it a more useful material, was not an easy one to get to. His early efforts, according to Rubber: An American Industrial History, earned respect from major politicians like Andrew Jackson and Henry Clay, but his products struggled on the market and he at one point faced bankruptcy.

But once he figured out his vulcanization process, Goodyear was in a position to reinvent numerous industries, with combs being near the top of the list.

At the time, combs tended to be made using intricate materials like bone, wood, and ivory. These materials came with a general fragility to them. If you dropped them, it’s possible you might mess up their teeth. They were the smartphones of their day.

Goodyear’s experiments with combs had a lot of advantages over this state of affairs. Rubber wasn’t a shatter risk, of course, and was firm enough that it could be used while offering a degree of flexibility. While vulcanization did not initially produce cheap combs, according to Chauncey Depew’s 1895 book 1795-1895: One Hundred Years of American Commerce, Volume 2, they soon reinvented the comb market:

The first article made in hard rubber to any considerable extent was the comb. It is said that Goodyear’s first experiments in this line made his combs cost twenty times as much as the ivory combs then in use ; but the rubber comb has now practically displaced all other kinds. Probably five hundred varieties of rubber combs have been made since the beginning of this industry.

Goodyear, who died in 1860, left behind a growing comb market, with two companies allowed to sell the devices under his patent—the India Rubber Comb Company and the American Hard Rubber Company. Eventually, though, Goodyear’s patent expired, and competition started to build up in the comb space, leading to more aggressive advertising in newspapers and trade publications. One of the common phrases that gained currency around this time was “unbreakable,” something highlighted by the Hercules Combs sold by the Butler Hard Rubber Company.

“Various kinds of so-called unbreakable combs have been offered to the public at different times, and the trade is cautioned against accepting any not bearing the gold stamp ‘Hercules,’ Warranted Unbreakable, on the one side, and The Butler Hard Rubber Co. in black on the other,” an ad for the device in American Druggist said in 1891.

It wouldn’t last, thanks to the eventual uptake in plastic, but there was a time when people thought of the word “Goodyear” and combs came to mind—rather than tires.

(Christopher Woodrich/Flickr)

Why the plastic comb was an incredibly obvious use for plastic

The fact of the matter is, it was inevitable that we were going to use plastic combs.

The use case was perfectly matched for the type of material, and while rubber got us a good portion of the way to unbreakable, it simply just makes a lot of sense that the first object to fold was going to be the comb.

(It at least helps that, unlike the straw, we use a comb hundreds, if not thousands of times before we lose it or get rid of it, and it’s an easy device to recycle into something else.)

Another factor at play is that the object is very easy to make and mold into a specific shape. When new types of plastic, such as nylon, appeared, combs often used the materials first.

Of course, not all plastics were built the same. As author Susan Freinkel noted in her book Plastic: A Toxic Love Story, manufacturing cellulose relied on a lot of hand-care, much like the old ivory and wood combs did, but newer materials didn’t require such care and could be manufactured much more simply.

Function won out over form, for better or worse.

“With the rise of mass-production plastics, the fanciful decorative combs and faux ivory dresser sets so popular in the celluloid era gradually disappeared,” Freinkel recalled in a book excerpt on Scientific American. “Combs were now stripped to the most essential elements—teeth and handle—in service of their most basic function.”

And after World War II, a truly “unbreakable” material—polypropylene, a flexible plastic invented by two European scientists in the 1950s—quickly became the high watermark for plastics, and, ultimately, redefined the comb yet again.

A 1975 Philadelphia Daily News article, colorfully, highlights the way that combs became a difficult business to stick with. Clement A. Belusar, the marketing director of the then-recently shuttered Ajax Comb Company, broke down how the move to an “unbreakable” plastic permanently did in the company.

“Then came polypropylene and the unbreakable comb. Our downfall,” he explained. “The only time you had to replace a comb was when you lost it. And when you lost it, somebody else could find it and he wouldn’t have to buy one. We’re out of the business …”

I lose combs pretty often, so I assume that they should’ve just waited for me to be born.