Who invented comb

Many black women remember it: the smoky smell of heated hair, the tense craning of necks to keep still while the darkened comb hovered closer to the scalp, and the occasional burns. Whether it was heated on the kitchen stove, in a heater at the salon, or plugged into the wall, the hot comb promoted beauty while masking a complicated history.

It is a common misconception that Madam C. Walker invented the hot comb. It is also a misconception that she was the only African American woman to make a fortune from the black hair care industry. The truth, however, is that while her accomplishments were extraordinary, another African American woman named Annie Turnbo Malone initially pioneered the path that Walker took.

The successes of Malone and Walker in expanding the black hair and beauty industry are closely intertwined with the history of the hot comb and changing beauty standards. Electrical hot comb heater and hot comb, s. Manufactured by Solar Electric Manufacturing Co. Tracing the history of the hot comb is complicated, largely due to misinformation and missing or unclear documentation.

Tracing its patents also proves to be troublesome because the hot comb was referred to by many names and seems to have had several inventors. It is difficult to identify precisely when the first hot comb was invented.

A Frenchman named Marcel Grateau, who went by several names, is often accredited with its invention in the late s when the hot comb was used by white women in Europe. Note it is very possible for him to have invented the hot comb without having a registered patent for it. In , the invention was being marketed to white women in popular American store catalogs like Bloomingdale's.

Other individuals with patents for hot combs include, but are not limited to, Walter Sammons in and a St. Louis based woman named Clara Grant in The reasons for straightening hair vary from person to person. For some, it marked the passage to adulthood, from the childhood tradition of wearing braids. Annie Malone was born in , in Metropolis, Illinois, to formerly enslaved parents and orphaned at a young age.

From an early age, Malone understood that for African American women, appearance and grooming represented more than their personal style. Growing up in southern Illinois along the Ohio River, Malone witnessed firsthand how southern blacks migrating to northern states around the turn of the 19th century tended to treat their hair. African American women who worked labor-intensive jobs in the South sometimes had little time or money to properly care for their hair, causing it to become susceptible to ailments such as dandruff, alopecia, and other forms of scalp disease.

Malone realized that improving hair health could also have a positive effect on the lives of African American women and men and sought to provide assistance. By doing so, it allowed them an option to adapt to a society that judged them based on how they met the American standard of beauty, which excluded the natural appearance of most African Americans. As a businesswoman, Malone had to overcome many challenges, including being a black woman in a segregated and sexist society.

To avoid the cost of having their hair straightened at a salon women began to use clothes irons to straighten the hair. Many women used electric irons to straighten their hair right up to the 's. The famous Black American entrepreneur Madam C.

Walker invented a line of African-American hair care products in including the world's first hair-straightening formula - but contrary to popular belief she did not invent the hot comb. The improved Hot Comb invented by Walter Sammons had a thermometer housed in the tongs that extended into the handle so that the user would know how hot the comb had become.

The handles were also insulated to prevent heat being conducted and burning the user. Improvements to various hot comb designs continued over the years. Hot combs and hair straighteners are still popular today with the latest designs having digital temperatures and automatic cut offs. Facts about who invented the Hot Comb. Inventions and Inventors Index. Cookies Policy. By Linda Alchin.

Privacy Statement. Louis at the turn of the 20th century. She suffered from both dandruff and balding, which she blamed on the harsh chemicals used in shampoos and hair styling products. In Davis moved to Denver. While she continued to sell the Poro line, she also began developing her own formulas. Two years later, she relocated to Pittsburgh, where she set up a beauty school called Lelia College.

She also pursued copyrights for her formulas. Eventually she started the competing Poro College. The third woman entrepreneur to champion African American hair care was Sara Spencer Washington , who opened a small beauty shop and began selling her line of products door to door in Atlantic City, N.

Sometime around , she founded the Apex News and Hair Company, and like Malone and Davis, she set up training schools. These three businesswomen, each with her own line of products and her own techniques, set the stage for training generations of African American beauticians. The Madam C. Walker method used a hot comb, Poro preferred a hair-puller iron, and Apex a curling iron. So in demand were their offerings that all three women became millionaires, at a time when such status was rare for women and for African Americans.

Just as the history of the hot comb has been anonymized, so has much of the history of the users of hot combs. The activities of countless hairdressers, beauticians, and ordinary women rarely get recorded unless the objects they used are donated to a museum. Unfortunately, I could find very little public information about McIntyre, who died in at the age of Small, local museums sometimes do a better job of documenting everyday life than do larger institutions.

This historic house museum traces several generations of a successful entrepreneurial African American family. Such histories miss the multimillion-dollar industry that provided autonomy and financial independence for hundreds of thousands of African American women. At a time when most could find work only as servants, cleaners, or washerwomen, employment as a beautician commanded respect within their communities.

The anonymous technologies that helped them get there should also be remembered. Part of a continuing series looking at photographs of historical artifacts that embrace the boundless potential of technology. She combines her interests in engineering, history, and museum objects to write the Past Forward column, which tells the story of technology through historical artifacts.

The HX cipher machine is an electromechanical, rotor-based system designed and built by Crypto AG. The machine uses nine rotors [center right] to encrypt messages.

A dual paper-tape printer is at the upper left. Growing up in New York City, I always wanted to be a spy. But when I graduated from college in January , the Cold War and Vietnam War were raging, and spying seemed like a risky career choice. So I became an electrical engineer, working on real-time spectrum analyzers for a U. I was fascinated. Some years later, I had the good fortune of visiting the huge headquarters of the cipher machine company Crypto AG CAG , in Steinhausen, Switzerland, and befriending a high-level cryptographer there.

My friend gave me an internal history of the company written by its founder, Boris Hagelin. It mentioned a cipher machine, the HX Like the Enigma, the HX was an electromechanical cipher system known as a rotor machine.

It was the only electromechanical rotor machine ever built by CAG, and it was much more advanced and secure than even the famous Enigmas. In fact, it was arguably the most secure rotor machine ever built. I longed to get my hands on one, but I doubted I ever would. Fast forward to I'm in a dingy third subbasement at a French military communications base. Accompanied by two-star generals and communications officers, I enter a secured room filled with ancient military radios and cipher machines.

I am amazed to see a Crypto AG HX, unrecognized for decades and consigned to a dusty, dimly lit shelf. I carefully extract the kilogram pound machine.

There's a hand crank on the right side, enabling the machine to operate away from mains power. As I cautiously turn it, while typing on the mechanical keyboard, the nine rotors advance, and embossed printing wheels feebly strike a paper tape. I decided on the spot to do everything in my power to find an HX that I could restore to working order. If you've never heard of the HX until just now, don't feel bad. Most professional cryptographers have never heard of it.

Yet it was so secure that its invention alarmed William Friedman, one of the greatest cryptanalysts ever and, in the early s, the first chief cryptologist of the U.

After reading a Hagelin patent more on that later , Friedman realized that the HX, then under development, was, if anything, more secure than the NSA's own KL-7 , then considered unbreakable.

The reasons for Friedman's anxiety are easy enough to understand. The HX had about 10 possible key combinations; in modern terms, that's equivalent to a 2,bit binary key. For comparison, the Advanced Encryption Standard , which is used today to protect sensitive information in government, banking, and many other sectors, typically uses a or a bit key. In the center of the cast-aluminum base of the HX cipher machine is a precision Swiss-made direct-current gear motor.

Also visible is the power supply [lower right] and the function switch [left], which is used to select the operating mode—for example, encryption or decryption. Peter Adams. A total of 12 different rotors are available for the HX, of which nine are used at any one time.

Current flows into one of 41 gold-plated contacts on the smaller-diameter side of the rotor, through a conductor inside the rotor, out through a gold-plated contact on the other side, and then into the next rotor. The incrementing of each rotor is programmed by setting pins, which are just visible in the horizontal rotor. Just as worrisome was that CAG was a privately owned Swiss company, selling to any government, business, or individual. But traffic encrypted by the HX would be unbreakable.

Friedman and Hagelin were good friends. During World War II, Friedman had helped make Hagelin a very wealthy man by suggesting changes to one of Hagelin's cipher machines, which paved the way for the U. Army to license Hagelin's patents. The resulting machine, the MB , became a workhorse during the war, with some , units fielded. Hagelin agreed not to sell his most secure machines to countries specified by U. He convinced Hagelin not to manufacture the new device, even though the machine had taken more than a decade to design and only about 15 had been built, most of them for the French army.

However, was an interesting year in cryptography. Hair Combs were initially made of stone, wood, or ivory from elephant tusks, but are now made almost exclusively from metal or plastic. However, combs made from wood are fast becoming popular again for the numerous benefits associated. Toggle navigation. You may also like to read. How to Prevent Hair Loss?