At the time of the inventor hairstylists, of the lords of the permanent and of the kings of the cut, who loaded themselves in a few beauty salons, the female gender called for the rescue of an apparatus for drying the hair and regaining freedom. That was how the hair dryer was invented.
Seriously, it is one of the most commonly used beauty devices and there is no home that does not have one. Or more than one! By now we take for granted not only that it is present wherever you go, from the hotel to the holiday home, but that it is also of excellent quality.
And we get upset when in a hotel we find ourselves in front of a hairdryer that blows warm air and that would not even dry our eyebrows. Many people do not trust and carry with them their trusty hair dryer wherever they go, others opt for a small and travel version and others still adapt to anything, provided they dry the hair.
But to whom do we owe this brilliant invention? Who is the mind behind this precious light, an ergonomic appliance that blows hot air and allows us to dry and style our hair? We must go back to 1888 … Are you curious to find out who the invention of the hair dryer is? So go with the post!
HAIR DRYER INVENTION: WHO IS THE IDEA?
It seems that once you wash your hair, it was a great excuse to decline an invitation to go out. Not so much for the washing itself, but for the drying that really took a long time, even by the hairdresser.
It was then that, to try to solve this problem, a French hairdresser devised a drying system. It was 1888 and Alexandre Godefroy devised a helmet to be applied to his customers’ wet head and attached to a gas stove chimney with a hose.
It was obviously not portable, nor intended to be used at home, and was far from even the most modern hairdresser’s seating, but it did its duty: the client sat under the appliance and the heat of the gas stove dried her hair. The helmet also had a valve to let the steam escape and prevent the client’s head from “cooking”.
Although still far from the concept of a hairdryer as we understand it now, it was a big step forward compared to the devices used previously; among these were some “brushes/plates” in glazed stoneware, with wooden handles and caps. They were actually containers to be filled with boiling water and, according to the instructions, they would have dried their hair in a few minutes … surely ingenious, but let’s say that the invention of the actual hairdryer was urgent.
FROM 1911 TO THE 20S: FROM THE VACUUM CLEANER TO THE INVENTION OF THE MODERN HAIRDRYER
The invention of Godefroy was certainly a step forward, but together with the attempts of gas hair dryers that followed, it lacked an important element: the hot air jet.
And what did a jet of hot air provide in those years? According to online sources, it seems that at the beginning of the 20th century, advertisements and inventors urged women to dry their hair in a “creative” way; applying a hose to the vacuum cleaner exhaust …
THE MOST CREATIVE DRIED THE HAIR USING … THE VACUUM CLEANER!
The vacuum cleaners of the last century sucked air through the front, blowing it clean from the back and the pipe could be connected on both sides. So often the women connected the tube to the hole in the back of the vacuum cleaner and used the air out to dry their hair. What to say, the end justifies the means!
Also in those years, precisely in 1911, the Armenian-American inventor Gabriel Kazanjian obtained the patent for the first hand-held hair dryer, that is, which could be kept as modern ones. In the following years, “portable” hair dryers began to spread on the market, but the devices continued to be metal for a long time, very heavy and dangerous.
They weighed in fact almost a kilo, tended to overheat very externally and there were many cases of electrocution…in short, it was not really a walk to make the turn!
Moreover they were not even very powerful; in fact, they had a maximum capacity of 100 watts, which made drying very long. That’s why perhaps many continued to resort to vacuuming.