Permanent Wave

[petal]

Historically, women have wished to have wavy or curly hair which seemed more attractive than the more common straight hair. Attempts to curl it by wetting and winding or tying with paper produces only superficial effects. So called water- or finger- waving or setting can be produced by manipulating the wet hair with the fingers, using a viscous lotion (generally made with gum tragacanth) to hold it in place. Washing would immediately destroy the waving. High temperatures were known to be effective for waving hair but impractical unless applied to hair separated from the scalp, which is how wigs were made.
The first person to produce a practical thermal method was Marcel (Grateau) in 1872. He devised a pair of specially manufactured tongs, in which one of the arms had a circular cross-section and the other a concave one, so that one fitted inside the other when the tongs were closed. The tongs were generally heated over a gas or alcohol flame and the correct temperature was achieved by testing the tongs on a newspaper - if the paper browned slightly it was about right. The waving itself was safe if care was taken to keep the tongs away from the scalp. The procedure was to comb a lock of hair towards the operator moving the comb slowly with one hand to maintain some tension, while with the other hand applying the tongs to the hair successively down the lock of hair towards the point. Each time the tongs were applied, they were move slightly in a direction normal to the lock of hair, thus producing a continuous flat or two-dimensional wave. Skill using the wrist could produce slight variations of the wave. Thus, Marcel waving produced a two-dimensional wave, by thermal means only and the change was produced by plastic flow of the hair rather than by any chemical means. Because of the high temperature used, the process tended to degrade the hair. However, in spite of its drawbacks, forms of Marcel waving have persisted until today, when speedy results and low cost are important.
Until the start of the twentieth century, women's hair was not cut, but as the demand for self-determination grew amongst women, it was shortened so that it did not pass the lower end of the neck. This was not only a political gesture but a practical one as women began to take over men's work due to the great shortage of labour during the First World War. At the same time, electricity which at first had been introduced mainly for lighting and industrial use, began to be used for heating and the application of the electric motor at the small business and domestic level. As shorter hair was improved in appearance by waving even more than long hair, it was only a matter of time before an improved form of waving appeared.

An early alternative method for curling hair that was suitable for use on people was invented in the year 1906 by the German hairdresser Charles Nessler (1872-1951). He used a mixture of cow urine and water. The first public demonstration took place on October 8, 1906, but Nessler had been working on the idea since 1896. Previously, wigs had been set with caustic chemicals to form curls, but these recipes were too harsh to use next to human skin. His method, called the spiral heat method, was only useful for long hair. The hair was wrapped in a spiral around rods connected to a machine with an electric heating device. Sodium hydroxide, a strong alkali, was applied and the hair was heated (212°F; 100°C or more) for an extended period of time. The process used about twelve, two-pound brass rollers and took six hours to complete. These hot rollers were kept from touching the scalp by a complex system of countering weights which were suspended from an overhead chandelier and mounted on a stand. His first experiments were conducted on his wife, Katharina Laible. The first two attempts resulted in completely burning her hair off and some scalp burns, but the method was perfected and his electric permanent wave machine was improved in London in 1909.
Nessler had moved to London in 1901, and during World War I, the British jailed Nessler because he was German and forced him to surrender his assets. He escaped to New York City in 1915, buying passage on a steamship under an assumed name. In New York, he found that hundreds of copies of his machine were in use, but most did not work well and were unreliable. Nessler opened a shop on East 49th St., and soon had salons in Chicago, Detroit, Palm Beach, Florida and Philadelphia. Nessler also developed a machine for home use that was sold for fifteen dollars. However, his machine made little impression in Europe and his first attempts were not even mentioned in the professional press, perhaps because they were too long-winded, cumbersome and dangerous.

Eugene Suter was a Swiss immigrant who set up a fashionable ladies' salon in London's West End. He claimed to have come from Paris, which in those days was the centre of fashion and style. He became aware of the possibilities of electrical permanent waving particularly now that shorter hair allowed the design of smaller equipment. The system had to be considered in two parts; one was the electric heater and the other was the system of winding and holding the hair on a former which was inserted each time into the heater. Suter tried to design a heater but was unsuccessful.

Isidoro Calvete was a Spanish immigrant who in 1917 in the same area of London set up a workshop for the repair and manufacture of electrical equipment for the hairdressing and medical professions. Suter consulted him on the heater and Calvete designed a practical model consisting of a winding inserted into an aluminium tube. Suter patented the design in his own name and for the next 12 years ordered all his hairdressing equipment from Calvete but marketed under his commercial name, Eugene Ltd, which became synonymous with permanent waving throughout the world. At the same time, Calvete developed his own products which he manufactured under the name Icall, Ltd. The simultaneous manufacture of two competing lines would inevitably end in conflict
After World War I, short hair came into vogue. Because Nessler's method wrapped the hair in a spiral along the rods, it couldn't be used with short hair and alternate systems began to be developed. The croquignole method, where the hair is wrapped straight up the rod from the ends to the scalp, was invented in 1924 by a Czech hairdresser, Josef Mayer. It quickly became popular because it could be used with many different lengths of hair. Also during this time, a machineless method that applied preheated clamps over the wrapped rods was invented, In 1931, at the Midwest Beauty Show in Chicago, Ralph I. Evans and Everett G. McDonough showed a heatless system for the first time. Their method used bi-sulfide solution and was often applied at the salon, left on while the client went home and removed the next day, leading it to be called the overnight wave.
While the later methods were improvements on the original, all of those mentioned above used very strong alkali solution, tight wrapping, and long developing times, and more often than not caused hair damage and scalpburns.