* The official Gillette NEW: Made in England thread*

The Gillette NEW, what a great razor! There's so much information dotted around this site and the web, let's compile everything into one thread for the wiki! There's lots of gaps so if you've got any information to add/amend, need a question answered or just want show off your NEW post away!
I've split the English NEW up into 4 components. Head type, handle style, patent markings and sets. Hopefully it'll make things a bit easier. (no idea how the tables will look, they get dropped when you preview a thread)

Gillette introduced razors with the NEW head design in 1930 (or was it '29? Isn't the UK usually a year behind the US?) and continued to produce variants through out the mid '40s, long after the US.


(#77, #88 and 3 piece. Pic from Jake)


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HEAD TYPES:


Image taken from Xillions collection.


Images taken from Mr-Razors collection



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HANDLES:




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PATENT MARKINGS:






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SETS:
I've split these up into US style, high end, two piece, pre war three piece and 40s/other sets.

This looks officially official.

Well in music the UK sure isn't behind the US, thats for sure... Virtually an Island of Bards there! In any case, that's one hell of a compendium of Gillette New razors that you put together. Congratulations. Definitely looks official!

Wow!
You have put together a wealth of information.

I'm sure I'll have more comments once I've gone through everything here a little more closely, but for now the one thing that jumps out at me is that what you're calling the "Flat bottom" head here is more commonly referred to as the NEW DeLuxe head.

Wonderful work and the start of something special.

MacDaddy said:

I'm sure I'll have more comments once I've gone through everything here a little more closely, but for now the one thing that jumps out at me is that what you're calling the "Flat bottom" head here is more commonly referred to as the NEW DeLuxe head.

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Got to it 1st...as always

Great job. I can finally focus again after going through all the information you provided.

OK, going a little deeper here... Easy one first: At least the Criterion and very probably the Belmont were offered in gold as well as silver. I've got a gold, two-piece Criterion, so I can personally vouch for that one, and it just makes sense that the Belmont would have been available in gold, too, if the Criterion was.

Messier one second: You've got the British NEW patents a bit mucked up. Here are the ones I'm talking about:


When you see the variations of "352975-6-7" or "352975'6" and so on, that's referring to two or more of the first three patents above and is just abbreviating the repeated numbers since the patents are sequential. I don't believe I've ever seen anything hanging off the later 363892 patent like you've got above, and I'm betting, if you took them from somewhere else, those were just someone making a mistake typing the numbers out.

It might be easier if we just set up a new wiki page for this information so we can edit a common pool of content. I'm sort of surprised that we don't seem to have a British NEW page already... I'll do it in the morning when I'm on my real computer if someone doesn't beat me to it before then.

Thanks MacDadddy, a wiki would be perfect (I'm useless at this sort of thing)

Yep, there was a typo on the patents, doh. Sequential numbering is only on 352975. Would a razor with 352975'6'7 come before 352975'6 if they were issued at the same time? Did it become less relevant as 352977 was a blade feature?

A gold two-piece Criterion? Wow!

wimbouman said:

Wow!
You have put together a wealth of information.

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Not me, just trawling through existing B&B posts looking at everyone's nice collections.

Isn't the UK usually a year behind the US?

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GMT we asways get there first or is it last?

By the way is that a pic of your own collection?

creamgravy said:

Thanks MacDadddy, a wiki would be perfect (I'm useless at this sort of thing)

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OK, I'll get something set up for us.

creamgravy said:

Yep, there was a typo on the patents, doh. Sequential numbering is only on 352975. Would a razor with 352975'6'7 come before 352975'6 if they were issued at the same time? Did it become less relevant as 352977 was a blade feature?

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That was something I conjectured here in this thread, but I don't think we really have any evidence one way or another.

creamgravy said:

A gold two-piece Criterion? Wow!

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Here you go. I grabbed a quick family portrait for you:



Incidentally, it's also entirely possible that the Richwood came in a two-piece version as well as the three-piece one like the Criterion/Belmont did. Berkin found this two-piece example here in a Richwood case a while back. One possible explanation for the whole two-piece handle is that it was a design change that Gillette brought over at some point during the NEW lifecycle from their acquisition of the German company Roth-Büchner who owned the Rotbart brand, which had a very similar two-piece handle. I'm not 100% certain of the chronology there -- that Rotbart definitively had the handle style before these Gillettes -- but the acquisition itself happened in 1926, and there are plenty of examples of Rotbart/Gillette cross-over models. And mechanically speaking, the notion of the crimp in the handle to hold the inner barrel inside the handle leads in a straight line to Gillette's TTO design.

http://wiki.badgerandblade.com/Category:Gillette_NEW_Razors already has some USA patent info and other general information about this family of razors. Adding UK patents etc would make sense to me.

Wow, that is a wealth of information!

rarer #75 is missing

mblakele said:

http://wiki.badgerandblade.com/Category:Gillette_NEW_Razors already has some USA patent info and other general information about this family of razors. Adding UK patents etc would make sense to me.

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Hmm... Good point. I was picturing adding a page under the English subsection here. That whole section really just needs to be overhauled. I think we should reorder it so that the razors are grouped first by generation (Old Type, New Improved, etc.) and then the specific razor/set pages under those categories can discuss any variations by country of origin -- American Belmont vs. British Belmont, for example.

Safety Razor Database is a mess. Rather than overhauling it, we have been thinking about replacing the whole thing with a redirect to http://wiki.badgerandblade.com/Category:Safety_Razors - where there are already subcategories for the various families of razor designs. We could add country-based categories to that.

mblakele said:

Safety Razor Database is a mess. Rather than overhauling it, we have been thinking about replacing the whole thing with a redirect to http://wiki.badgerandblade.com/Category:Safety_Razors - where there are already subcategories for the various families of razor designs. We could add country-based categories to that.

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That "index" style presentation is fine if you're looking to jump straight to a particular thing (and happen to know how what you're looking for was titled), but it would still be helpful to have a "table of contents" style presentation that would give you the context of the hierarchy of the different generations, which is what the Safety Razor Database is failing at right now.

MacDaddy said:

That "index" style presentation is fine if you're looking to jump straight to a particular thing (and happen to know how what you're looking for was titled), but it would still be helpful to have a "table of contents" style presentation that would give you the context of the hierarchy of the different generations, which is what the Safety Razor Database is failing at right now.

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Achim has his data in this fashion.

1903... Old Type

1921... New Improved

1929... The NEW

1931... The Goodwill

1938... The Tech

1934... One-Piece open comb

1940... One-Piece solid guard bar

1956... Adjustable

This makes his site easy for us to use. BTW: Thanks Achim.

This could make a good start for what Porter is discussing for the Safety Razor Database for the Gillette section.

GDCarrington said:

Achim has his data in this fashion.

1903... Old Type

1921... New Improved

1929... The NEW

1931... The Goodwill

1938... The Tech

1934... One-Piece open comb

1940... One-Piece solid guard bar

1956... Adjustable

This makes his site easy for us to use. BTW: Thanks Achim.

This could make a good start for what Porter is discussing for the Safety Razor Database for the Gillette section.

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I agree, less clutter, easy ,fun to navigate and simple too.