Popular Science Monthly Your Razor Is Like a Scythe
IF we had eyes like microscopes, the process of shaving would seem not much different from mowing with a bush-scythe. A razor is practically a miniature bush-scythe, and its cutting action is similar. Some of the bushes are cut squarely across and others at an
acute angle. When the
bushes are upright, and the scythe is swung directly against them, the cut is made nearly at a right an- gle. But if the bush man cuts his bushes a little too high and then wants to go over them again, "grub- bing" them down to the ground, as he would
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��the lather is off, the barber will occa- sionally wet his lingers, because the face gets too dry. Indeed, there is nothing to maintain the perpendicularity of the beard. It bends over and the barber rapidly whacks away at it like the bush- man grubbing the bushes to the ground. In connection with these views of the
���Cuttings the second time over
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��phrase it, especially if the bushy stumps are in a marshy place where the ground does not hold them firmly, he strikes at them several times in succession, and the cut is likely to be more and more at a slant, depending upon the resistance with which they hold their own in the ground. \\'hen the barber ap])lies a heavy coat of lather to a long beard, the lather tends to. hold the hair upright. In the first shaving, the microscope shows that the cuttings are nearly at a right angle to the length of the beard, but the "second time over," when the call is for "a close shave, Mr. Barber," short rapid strokes are made, several times repeated. When
��Microscopic views of the cut- ings after shaving. The long hairs in the picture above are from a three days' growth of an Albino Irishman. Note that the hairs were cut near- ly at right angles
uiman l)eard, there is some- thing very surprising in Dean Swift's "A Voyage to Brob- dingnag," where he describes a mythical traveler to the land
of the giants and what he had to say of
giants' beards. He writes :
"I used to attend the king's levee once or twice a week, and had often seen him under the barber's hand, which, indeed, was at first very terrible to behold : for the razor was almost twice as long as an ordinary scythe.
1 once prevailed on the barber to give me
some of the suds or lather, out of which I picked forty or fifty of the strongest stumps of hair. I then took a piece of fine wood, and cut it like the back of a comb, making several holes in it at crpial distances with a needle....! fixed in tlio stumps S(~> artificially, scraping and sloping them with my knife to- wards the points, that I made a very tolerable comb which was a seasonable supply, my own being so much broken in the teeth, that it was almost useless."
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