Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Tracy, did you know that nineteen eighties hair aesthetics are back? I did not know this. I have. I stumbled across it. I didn't seek it out, but I discovered on TikTok a number of young people, like in their teens and twenties seeking out hairstylists who were working in the eighties so they can get an authentic eighties style perm. Okay with the flufy banks. We lived through it. It wasn't all great, but I kind of love that it's come back because we say lived through it. I mean specifically I had. I had the terrible eighties perm with the poofy banks. I did too. It was awful. It didn't look goost really bad. We can talk about it more on Friday, Yeah, for sure. So it got me to thinking because I was like, just the fact that permanent waves are coming back in in general, even if you're not doing an eighties style as a salon service that people will book. Because we've talked on the show before that I used to work in hair salons, and that was not a very common request going on at that point in time. So it's interesting to me that they're back so much. So I thought we would talk about particularly one man's work in that field, and he's usually credited with inventing permanent waves, as Charles Nessler. I also want to make sure we acknowledge upfront we are talking about perms on white people hair. Yeah, this is pretty much all I will mention very briefly. Laid on a sorting technique that Nessler invented that he's like for all types of hair, but it's not it involves white people. Yeah, it did not involve you know, any people of color that sometimes have different textures of hair. Certainly did not involve you know, any black people, anyone from Asia. It was white people, right, So just going into this, know that that is the caveat to the whole thing, is that we are literally talking about like white Eurocentric style and hair care. Yeah. Yeah, In the early decades of the twentieth century, there were a lot of innovations in the world of beauty technology. People have been finding ways to beautify themselves for all of recorded history, obviously, and we have talked about cosmetics in history many times, also talked about hair care, fashion, a lot of stuff. The man credited with really shifting the landscape of beauty treatments in the early twentieth century is Carl Nessler, who's actually known by a couple of other names. He is sometimes recorded as Charles Nesley, but most frequently is named in articles and on a book that he authored under the more anglicized name of Charles Nessler. We will talk about these varied names as we go through his story. Yeah, since Charles Nesler became what he used in his personal life, and we'll talk about that, that's what we're using for the most part here. So. Nessler was born in eighteen seventy two in todd Noow, Germany, which was and is a small town in the Black Forest. His father, Bartolomeus Nessler, was a shoemaker and his mother was Rossina Leitner Nessler. According to Nessler's account of his life, he was fascinated with hair from a very young age, and with curls in particular. His father was bald, and his mother and siblings all had lots of hair, which sparked his curiosity, and he wondered why his one family could have so much variety in their hair texture and type. Yes, some of them had straight hair and some of them had curly hair, and later he told reporters that they would argue over which one was superior, and they would make Carl judge. He became really fascinated with curls while doing shepherding jobs while he was young. He noticed that the wooly hair of sheep was always curly, unlike a lot of human hair. He had seen that people with straight hair could curl it, but that effect would wear off as it drooped over time or when the hair got wet. So he was thinking, again, according to his own account, about whether there was some way to permanently curl the hair. From the time he was quite young, he said to have collected hair samples as a kid, taking them from the local barbershop yeah, and presumably also from his siblings, who reportedly also had all both boys and girls had very long hair. Following on that fascination, he eventually got an apprenticeship with the barber in far Now, and after studying there for a while, he moved on to study with other barbers and barber surgeons in Basa, Milan, and Geneva. He worked for a while as a barber surgeon in Switzerland, and he performed all of the jobs that went along with that role, including minor surgeries and tooth extractions. He also would later tell a story that was pretty fascinating that we'll share behind the scenes. But most importantly, he got a lot of experience with hair, and this is when he first started using the name Nesle, which looks like Nesle to us in the US, allegedly to sound a little bit French and blend in better in Switzerland. Nessler moved to London at the end of the nineteenth century, and it was somewhere during this time that he started going by Charles instead of Carl. First, he got a job as a receptionist in a hair salon, and when he wasn't seeing clients, he kept himself busy working on an idea for a false eyelash, and then he moved on to trying to figure out how to permanently curl hair. Around this same time, Nessler, who was age thirty, decided that it was time to start a family, and he is said to have put an ad in the personal section of the paper that supposedly read man with nothing would like to meet a girl with a little capital. According to his account, twenty nine women responded, but one of them, Katerina Libel, happened to also be from the same area of Germany as him, and the two of them hit it off. They married seven months after they met, and they were happily married for the rest of their lives. They had four children together, two sons and two daughters. Nineteen oh two was when Nessler got his first patent for an invention he called a new or Improved method of and means for the manufacture of artificial eyebrows, eyelashes, and the like. The description of that invention read quote. Short loops of hair or other material are threaded over a hair and secured by twisting two other hairs round them by the appliance shown in Figure one. This consists of standards with hooks for holding the hair, and two hooks carried by an arm on a spindle which is turned by a hand wheel to twist the threads or hairs. This material may be used as an artificial eyelash, or maybe used as a foundation material for artificial eyebrows, wigs, fringes, et cetera, by twisting and nodding it to the shape desired. This was the first of many patents that Nessler would hold. I love that He's like early on, like, you know what, we need to make a machine that will make false eyelashes. One thing that is in this patent that appears in a lot of his is it unlike some of the patents we've talked about on the show, where it's like they're patenting one tiny part of a process or one machine. He's looping it all together in one big patent, which is interesting. Also, in the early nineteen hundreds, Nessler was asked by a lawyer to serve as an expert witness on matters of hair in a case. And this wasn't because Nessler had any name recognition at that point. That lawyer had merely walked into the salon where he worked looking for someone willing to take on this job. Who's like, I need a witness who can do this, And he talked to Nesler and was like, you'll do. As a consequence of the exposure that this case brought him, Nessler actually became in demand. He had a big bump in business and people started showing up at his job and asking for false eyelashes, and after selling out his initial run of eyelashes, he realized that he just needed to open his own shop. He was very successful in this business and he rapidly made a small fortune. In nineteen oh six, Nessler gave his first lecture about curly hair and his theories about it. That was to an audience of European professional hair stylists. People had been using water to set their hair in curlers of some type for centuries, and when the hair dried, the curlers were removed and this hair would be curly, but only temporarily. Nessler wanted to capture that curl in the wet stage and make it permanent, and his solution to the problem was to bake alkali into it, and he had designed a machine to do that. You have seen pictures of this machine. It looks like a big sea creature looking attraption with wires that hang from the ceiling or like a chandelier kind of apparatus, and they go to every single curler on a set head of hair. So that if you've seen those pictures, that was Nestler's or one of the many copycats that sprang up. Those curlers were made of bronze. I read one report that said each of them weighed a kilo, which seems so much, and that they were counterweighted in that chandelier apparatus. And those curlers could be heated electrically or by gas. Apparently some of his early attempts used gas as the heating mechanism, and he was essentially boiling each curl on the curler with his alkali solution to set it permanently. Nessler demonstrated the first permanent wave in front of a full audience at his salon on Oxford Street on a volunteer he knew well, which was his wife, Katerina. She'd been his test subject on previous tries with this process and had gotten some hair and scalp damage before things were all worked out. Both the heat and the chemicals could and did cause burns, so she sat for what was the public premiere of the permanent wave and let the assembled crowd watch as her husband transformed her straight hair into curls. Most of the assembled hair professionals were pretty dubious of Nessler's invention. Yeah, we should also mention this took hours and hours. I've seen different numbers of hours mentioned everything from four to ten, but in any case, it was a lot of time. It's even longer than a permanent eighties. Right, coming up, we're going to talk about how challenging it was to convince consumers to adopt the permanent wave. But first we'll have a quick sponsor break. One of the hurdles that Nessler faced in bringing his process to the masses was putting potential customers minds at ease about it. Remember this was the early twentieth century, so it was coming off of decades where women largely just let their hair grow and grow and then would put it up into buns. The idea of a chemical treatment was frightening for a lot of people. It still is for a lot of people. But Nessler promised in his advertising that his process would produce a quote soft, wavy mass and never quote a frows or a flute. There really was already a strong desire and a lot of places around the world for people to have a way to permanently curl straight hair. A story that ran in a variety of Australian newspapers in the summer of nineteen oh nine, which was the same year, Nessler patented the permanent Wave mentioned that children who had been treated for ringworm with X rays had then started growing curly hair when they previously had straight hair. Then questions started rolling into the papers after that initial report from women who wondered if they could get curly hair that way. An X ray specialist named Harry W. Cox of London was consulted and his response was quote, there seems to be no reason why that not be done, provided the lady is willing to become entirely bald for a time. The X ray is the speediest depilatory known, and I suppose the fact that the fresh hair is curly has something to do with the action of the rays on the scalp. Today, we know that a big determiner of whether hair is curly or straight is the shape of the hair follicle. Symmetrical follicles that lie perpendicular to the skin generally produce straight hair, and follicles that sit at an angle to the skin are asymmetrical and curved those produce curly hair. Treatments like chemotherapy and radiation can alter hair follicles, which is why sometimes when people go through chemo and they finish it, their hair goes back curly. Yeah, they get what's called chemo curls. Also for clarity, like, it's worth noting X rays had not been around that long at this point in time. Uh, and they were not as as well understood, and they were usually a lot more dangerous in terms of exposure than they would be today. I'm like, which episode did we talk about the X ray historyan, because it was uh, yeah, there was some scary stuff, especially in the early years. Yeah. So to me, the idea that kids got X rays for ringworm that were strong enough that it changed their hair structure, I'm like, yike, yikes. So this also ties into the other problem that Nessler had in the early days of offering permanent waves. The word permanent gay some clients the impression that after having the service done, their hair would be curly forever, and Nessler had to educate his customers that new growth would not be curly. He was only able to change the texture of the hair on their head at the time of service. He also told a story to press about a pregnant client who had a permanent wave service performed and then was angry at him when her baby was born with straight hair. On the one hand, that sounds like a fanciful story, and on the other people do sometimes come up with rather wild ideas. I could talk about some of my experiences in behind the scenes. Though he had those hurdles, people really really did want curls, and Nessler became so well known and so good at them that he was often called away from London to do the hair of various royals of Europe. In nineteen fifteen, Nessler patented the artificial eyelash and a process for applying it. This involves curling each eyelash hair into and then applying a strip of mink to the lash base to create the illusion of a full lash. That same year he left London and moved to the United States, and this was precipitated by World War One, which had left him without many clients and without income. Some accounts suggest that he may have been jailed in Britain because he was German. It's a little unclear. I didn't find verification on that. He did seem to get out of Great Britain in a hurry and with very little to his name. When Nessler moved to New York City, he carried with him only one thousand dollars and his patents for his permanent wave and his false eyelashes and one thousand dollars, to be clear, was no small sum in nineteen fifteen, but he had been successful enough in his business that this would have been a pretty small slice of his financial worth, so it does seem likely that his assets may have been seized. He found out when he got to the US that there were people already making their own versions of his permanent wave machine in the US and selling them, and he was also told that there were only three hairdressers in the entire country that made enough money to pay income tax. His first shop in New York was on West forty sixth Street, and the first day he was open reported sixty two clients showed up thanks to his reputation abroad and an ad he had taken out in the New York Times, but all of them were too fearful of his permanent wave machine to actually have Nessler do their hair, so he used his contacts to get a client from London who happened to be in the city come in for a free perm As words spread that his machine was in use, a crowd gathered and By the end of the process, which took several hours, he had clients actually booking appointments. Yeah, this is the case where the length of the process probably helped him, because there was time for the word to spread that he's like very obviously doing this in his shop, and you could see it through the window and we could all go. Look. His business after that grew, and it grew really quickly. Before long he had a reported one hundred employees in another shop at six fifty seven Fifth Avenue that was catering to upscale patrons. He seems to have been a well liked boss. People called him Father Nesle. He offered things like company picnics and fancy dinners for his staff each year, and according to a nineteen thirty three New Yorker article, he distributed thirty five thousand dollars in holiday bonuses each year, just a lot. He was obviously making a lot of money. His permanent wave service cost a whopping one hundred and twenty dollars. While currency inflation calculators aren't always all that reliable, Just for the sake of a sense of how expensive this was, in twenty twenty four, it would be more than about three thousand dollars probably, although that was a huge sum of money even for the wealthy. He attracts at a regular clients hell who he fed as well as styled. One of his most famous patrons was Edith Wilson, known publicly as Missus Woodrow Wilson. His business grew so quickly that he wasn't performing any services himself in just a couple of years, but he was greeting all the clients and chatting with them as he glided through the salon during their service. Yeah, apparently he would sometimes just show up with this tray of Sandwiches'd be like, I've brought your snack during your perm which I love this idea of feeding his clients a beautiful lunch while they sit there. He also founded the Nesley Patent Holding Company, although he was still going by Nessler in his personal life. He maintained the name Charles Nesley for his business affairs, and then he started opening additional shops around New York and then spreading throughout the country in a chain. By the nineteen twenties, the permanent Wave had become wildly pops in North America, and demand for the process was so great that the beauty industry really exploded. Shops were popping up everywhere to meet the increased interest of the public, and that in turn led to two things, knockoffs of Nessler's machine and a raft of other inventions to offer various beauty treatments to customers. Like we've made it clear that he was really focused on white people's hair, but like this did include people making permanent wave machines specifically for the needs of black women's hair. As part of this whole wave of invention, there was an entire new industry born in the early nineteen teens. It was not as though people had never specialized in hair care as a professional service. We've talked, for example, about Leonard Autier, who was hairdresser to Marie Antoinette. But this was a massive change in how people thought about it. Suddenly there were entirely new prospects for both professionals and consumers. And of course this also gets tangled up in twentieth century beauty standards, and it is a self feeding loop. As more people of a wider range of socioeconomic classes gained access to new treatments and styling, those treatments became popular, and they supported and grew a whole new industry, which then kept offering new treatments and upkeep plans to keep revenue coming in. And part of marketing to people and especially women well before this and also booming during this time, was suggesting that if they did not seek out beauty treatments, they would not look right or appealing. So this is obviously an ugly cycle. On the upside, though, a whole new level of industry offered new opportunities both to companies and to the workforce. According to a Time magazine article published in nineteen fifty one, in nineteen oh eight, before the permanent wave was patented, there were approximately three thousand beauty salons in the United States. In nineteen fifty one, there were one hundred and twenty seven thousand of them, and all of them needed a full array of furniture and equipment and professionals to use that equipment, and estimated three hundred and fifty thousand people staffed these salons, and income for stylists could be more than one hundred dollars a week. That sounds really small now, but that was way above average at the time. There are some interesting additional statistics that are shared in that writeup. Average visits in nineteen fifty one ran more than five dollars and three million, seven hundred and fifty thousand women in the US visited salons each year, and to keep those customers, salons began to offer a wider and wider array of services, including things like massage, manicures, pedicures, false eyelash application, makeup application, et cetera. In nineteen twenty seven, Yvonne Loan of Los Angeles got her first permanent wave and was touted US holding a record because of it. She was the youngest person to ever have had one, at the age of eighteen months. Yeah, that record may have been broken since then, but at the time it was kind of a big deal. Nineteen twenty eight was a big year in Nessler's story, and we'll talk about his dicey book that came out that year after we hear from the sponsors that keep the show going. Nineteen twenty eight was a busy year for Charles Nessler. His book The Story of Hair, Its Purpose and Preservation published that year, and it is not exactly what you might expect in a book about hair. Nesler lets the reader know this isn't just going to be about coiffure. In the preface writing quote Between the day when I began to learn at firsthand about the phenomena of human hair and the time in which I have been writing this book, many things have happened in my chosen field of research. Indeed, many of these things I have helped to happen. The physical and mental sciences have been my aids, and the new viewpoints on the subject of human hair which I set forth here have been the result of the combination of scientific and psychological study. In nineteen oh five I brought forth my invention of the permanent way. Twenty years later came still another and vastly more important discovery, that of classification of hair according to texture. So so far that seems fairly normal and interesting, But the next couple of paragraphs hints at some of the problems to come. Quote. For years, in many countries and among many classes of people, I have sought the truth about human hair. I have been on terms of intimacy in every stratum of society. I have visited innumerable institutions, hospitals, orphanages, prisons, schools, and factories, studying the relationship between the individuals. I have found and the hair on their heads. With the passage of years, observations became theories, and theories verified themselves until they became conclusions. My hair research left the field of science and entered the realm of psychology. Okay, so that slightly eyebrow raising that Tracy just read really sets up the meat of his book, which is filled with concepts that he claims to have worked out logically. He talks, for example, a lot about evolution in the book, although as much as he talks about science, he seems to be working exclusively from his own conclusions and not referring to the work of evolutionary scientists. He has an entire chapter on the body hair that people usually begin to grow during adolescence as part of their secondary sex characteristics, But instead of treating this whole discussion in a scientific way, he introduces a character named Gonad, who he describes as quote, a messenger of uncertain purpose. He turns out to be a troublemaker and a peace to He goes on, quote Gonad has an important task and he means to do it in an artistic way. So obviously this is a weird book. I don't know any other way to describe it. He also makes a lot of bold and flatly incorrect claims in this chapter about sexuality and hair, and about how older women trick men into marrying them by appearing younger, which Nessler says is reducing the human race. He also talks about how some races have lower sex drives than others, and how men with beards are the ones who sustain the human race. There's a lot of nonsense. He also states a lot of falsehoods about various cultures as though they are objective truths, and a lot of them are gross and bigoted and demonstrably untrue. This book also has a chapter called hair and Obesity, which is also full of falsehoods that are stated as fact, like he believed that so called weak hair was somehow connected to obesity. He notes that different people have different dietary needs and that it can be difficult to find the right balance, but he also makes a lot of really demeaning statements about people's weight. He suggests that every person who in his mind, was carrying extra weight was more comfortable blaming anything but their diet for adding these pounds. He does also put forth that this is a cultural problem where humans have become accustomed to pleasing their palettes instead of just listening to their instincts. When it comes to selecting food, he seems to think a little adversity will keep a person's hair healthier. This is a weird, weird chapter on its own, but especially so in the context of a book about hair. It starts to feel like Nessler kind of wanted a way to justify fat shaming by claiming this was all part of his scientific observation. There are so many more bad takes in this book. There's one that reads, quote, the weak haared child will remain all its life weak in ambition what And there's a whole chapter about child rearing that is set up with the conceit that if children came with manuals, that chapter is the manual, right down to calling the child the machine throughout. Usually when I read a book like this for the show, I'll be like, it's an interesting read, even if you don't agree with it, And I'm like, maybe, don't even bother with this one. In the final chapter, almost like a grand finale, he talks about the permanent wave. He explains the theory in the science behind his permanent wave. If you curl damp hair and let it dry. It will retain the curl until it gets wet again. So Nessler explains his way to capture that curl effect in a more permanent way. As he explains, quote briefly, the application of a permanent wave consists of boiling the hair in an alcaloil solution while it is tightly wound on a curling rod. There is no solution in existence which can be used equally for all hair, since all hair is not alike. He goes on to explain that hair that is naturally very porous will take up the perm solution more quickly, which sounds like a benefit, but that it's also more prone to breakage. He describes this system that he developed in nineteen twenty six to classify hair by its porosity into ten groups, called the Textometer. A couple of caveats to this, though, Nessler warns that hair that has been chemically treated with dyes can be difficult to classify. Also, as Holly set up at the top of the show, this classification system was really only applied to the hair of white people. Yeah, he's so close where He's like, Hey, different textures have different needs, but then he's like, no, no, I'm just talking about the white ladies in my clientele. Even the New Yorker and a pretty flattering piece about Sessler, written five years after this book was published, calls it quote a rambling philosophic treatise on the relationship of hair to health, virility, character, and morals. And as for Nessler's scientific street cred that same write up states quote, in scientific circles he is regarded as at least interesting. Some of his ideas are regarded with cold suspicion, even misgiving. Also in nineteen twenty eight, Nessler was embroiled in a legal battle with the Lemour Company over patent infringement. Lamurr was based out of Cleveland and had made copies of Nessler's permanent wave machines and other products. As the litigation mounted, la Murrer offered to buy Nessler out for a million dollars cash plus stock. Nessler sold Nesley to Lemore, and the newly merged firms became Nesley Lemurr Company. Initially, Nessler took that cash and he seemed to kind of retire, at least from actively taking clients. He was still tinkering in his lab on various projects. He kept that lab in the city, but then his home was a huge estate in New Jersey. But he lost a lot of his fortune in the nineteen twenty nine stock market crash, and he was spurred to try to invent new hair care processes and technologies to bring in additional money. In the nineteen thirties, the cold wave was introduced. No longer did a customer have to be hooked up to a machine that ran current to their setting curls. Once the cold wave was invented, it wasn't long before the home permanent was brought to market. The home perm quickly gained popularity, and women even formed clubs and groups where they would perm each other's hair instead of going to the salon to save money. There are reports that I read that said that Nessler introduced a home perm years and years and years before this, But I'm like, but how, because cold perms weren't invented yet, and I could never find out what exactly was going on there. So this rise in popularity of home perms caused such a wave of concern in the salon world that the beauty industry actually lobbied lawmakers in the hopes of making home perms illegal. That did not work, but there was soon a pivot because when it became apparent that a lot of people getting home perms ended up with damaged hair and permanent curls that did not look like what they expected or wanted, the beauty industry seized the opportunity to book corrective treatments. That same idea of corrective services was soon also offered for hair color when it became available for home application. In nineteen forty eight, US beauty shops had gross sales of one point two billion dollars, which, according to a Life magazine article from nineteen fifty one, was just a little shy of the money made by movie theaters. The magazine gave Nessler credit for ushering in the new era of beauty shops and what they offered, noting specifically the permanent wave, but also alluding to the culture of beauty shops being a place that quote transformed the social life of women, giving them a club where they could read fashion magazines, bear their souls to sympathetic hairdressers, and pick up fascinating gossip about other bared souls. In nineteen forty nine, the American Women's Voluntary Services honored Nessler, noting that he had created jobs for a lot of women in the beauty industry under the award's umbrella language of enhancing the quote economic, cultural, and social prestige of women to contextualize this award. This was the same year that organization under that same umbrella recognized Vassar's president and Helen Keller with awards. In the nineteen forties. Nessler wanted to keep innovating, but he went down a lot of paths that were costly and unsuccessful. One of these was a massaging machine he invented, which promised to keep the skin looking youthful. Nessler died of a heart attack in January nineteen fifty one at the age of seventy eight. He was in his home in New Jersey when it happened. The year before he died, and estimated sixty eight million people in the United States had permanent wave services. In his career, he had invented combs for giving temporary waves, a baldness remedy, and a treatment to add curl to the hair of babies, among others. Yeah, we didn't get into all his patents, but it's a lot of them which is why we didn't get into them. It was just like one hair thing after another. He did a lot of beauty treatments. He didn't ever really remake his fortune, unfortunately. But that is Charles Nessler, who is another one that I just find completely engaging. I have another listener mail about Olympic sports. People love the Olympics. This is from our listener Laura that writes, Hi, Tracy and Holly, I love your show and I really love the recent episode on Olympic sports no longer in the Olympics. Funnily enough, I ran into this blurb from book Riot today on how writing was once considered an Olympic sport. I would love more info if you have room, and if there's enough info available to do an episode on writing as an Olympic sport, plus or minus other strange no longer in the Olympics events. Thanks for your wonderful show. Yeah, it might happen. I mentioned in our defunct Olympics or maybe it was behind the scenes that I did want to do one on the arts aspect of the Olympics. Yeah, that was an entire thing. It's on the list, yeah, and I think probably it will eventually become an episode, but I don't know when, but thank you for listening and for hanging in there. It might be a couple of years, Laura, but I promise I'm working on or at least I have it on my list. If you would like to write to us to make a request of a subject, or just talk about something that sparked your interest on the show, you can do that at History Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com. If you would like to subscribe and you haven't gotten around to it yet, there's no time like the present. You can do that on the iHeartRadio app, or anywhere you listen to your favorite shows. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Tracy, did you know that nineteen eighties hair aesthetics are back? I did not know this. I have. I stumbled across it. I didn't seek it out, but I discovered on TikTok a number of young people, like in their teens and twenties seeking out hairstylists who were working in the eighties so they can get an authentic eighties style perm. Okay with the flufy banks. We lived through it. It wasn't all great, but I kind of love that it's come back because we say lived through it. I mean specifically I had. I had the terrible eighties perm with the poofy banks. I did too. It was awful. It didn't look goost really bad. We can talk about it more on Friday, Yeah, for sure. So it got me to thinking because I was like, just the fact that permanent waves are coming back in in general, even if you're not doing an eighties style as a salon service that people will book. Because we've talked on the show before that I used to work in hair salons, and that was not a very common request going on at that point in time. So it's interesting to me that they're back so much. So I thought we would talk about particularly one man's work in that field, and he's usually credited with inventing permanent waves, as Charles Nessler. I also want to make sure we acknowledge upfront we are talking about perms on white people hair. Yeah, this is pretty much all I will mention very briefly. Laid on a sorting technique that Nessler invented that he's like for all types of hair, but it's not it involves white people. Yeah, it did not involve you know, any people of color that sometimes have different textures of hair. Certainly did not involve you know, any black people, anyone from Asia. It was white people, right, So just going into this, know that that is the caveat to the whole thing, is that we are literally talking about like white Eurocentric style and hair care. Yeah. Yeah, In the early decades of the twentieth century, there were a lot of innovations in the world of beauty technology. People have been finding ways to beautify themselves for all of recorded history, obviously, and we have talked about cosmetics in history many times, also talked about hair care, fashion, a lot of stuff. The man credited with really shifting the landscape of beauty treatments in the early twentieth century is Carl Nessler, who's actually known by a couple of other names. He is sometimes recorded as Charles Nesley, but most frequently is named in articles and on a book that he authored under the more anglicized name of Charles Nessler. We will talk about these varied names as we go through his story. Yeah, since Charles Nesler became what he used in his personal life, and we'll talk about that, that's what we're using for the most part here. So. Nessler was born in eighteen seventy two in todd Noow, Germany, which was and is a small town in the Black Forest. His father, Bartolomeus Nessler, was a shoemaker and his mother was Rossina Leitner Nessler. According to Nessler's account of his life, he was fascinated with hair from a very young age, and with curls in particular. His father was bald, and his mother and siblings all had lots of hair, which sparked his curiosity, and he wondered why his one family could have so much variety in their hair texture and type. Yes, some of them had straight hair and some of them had curly hair, and later he told reporters that they would argue over which one was superior, and they would make Carl judge. He became really fascinated with curls while doing shepherding jobs while he was young. He noticed that the wooly hair of sheep was always curly, unlike a lot of human hair. He had seen that people with straight hair could curl it, but that effect would wear off as it drooped over time or when the hair got wet. So he was thinking, again, according to his own account, about whether there was some way to permanently curl the hair. From the time he was quite young, he said to have collected hair samples as a kid, taking them from the local barbershop yeah, and presumably also from his siblings, who reportedly also had all both boys and girls had very long hair. Following on that fascination, he eventually got an apprenticeship with the barber in far Now, and after studying there for a while, he moved on to study with other barbers and barber surgeons in Basa, Milan, and Geneva. He worked for a while as a barber surgeon in Switzerland, and he performed all of the jobs that went along with that role, including minor surgeries and tooth extractions. He also would later tell a story that was pretty fascinating that we'll share behind the scenes. But most importantly, he got a lot of experience with hair, and this is when he first started using the name Nesle, which looks like Nesle to us in the US, allegedly to sound a little bit French and blend in better in Switzerland. Nessler moved to London at the end of the nineteenth century, and it was somewhere during this time that he started going by Charles instead of Carl. First, he got a job as a receptionist in a hair salon, and when he wasn't seeing clients, he kept himself busy working on an idea for a false eyelash, and then he moved on to trying to figure out how to permanently curl hair. Around this same time, Nessler, who was age thirty, decided that it was time to start a family, and he is said to have put an ad in the personal section of the paper that supposedly read man with nothing would like to meet a girl with a little capital. According to his account, twenty nine women responded, but one of them, Katerina Libel, happened to also be from the same area of Germany as him, and the two of them hit it off. They married seven months after they met, and they were happily married for the rest of their lives. They had four children together, two sons and two daughters. Nineteen oh two was when Nessler got his first patent for an invention he called a new or Improved method of and means for the manufacture of artificial eyebrows, eyelashes, and the like. The description of that invention read quote. Short loops of hair or other material are threaded over a hair and secured by twisting two other hairs round them by the appliance shown in Figure one. This consists of standards with hooks for holding the hair, and two hooks carried by an arm on a spindle which is turned by a hand wheel to twist the threads or hairs. This material may be used as an artificial eyelash, or maybe used as a foundation material for artificial eyebrows, wigs, fringes, et cetera, by twisting and nodding it to the shape desired. This was the first of many patents that Nessler would hold. I love that He's like early on, like, you know what, we need to make a machine that will make false eyelashes. One thing that is in this patent that appears in a lot of his is it unlike some of the patents we've talked about on the show, where it's like they're patenting one tiny part of a process or one machine. He's looping it all together in one big patent, which is interesting. Also, in the early nineteen hundreds, Nessler was asked by a lawyer to serve as an expert witness on matters of hair in a case. And this wasn't because Nessler had any name recognition at that point. That lawyer had merely walked into the salon where he worked looking for someone willing to take on this job. Who's like, I need a witness who can do this, And he talked to Nesler and was like, you'll do. As a consequence of the exposure that this case brought him, Nessler actually became in demand. He had a big bump in business and people started showing up at his job and asking for false eyelashes, and after selling out his initial run of eyelashes, he realized that he just needed to open his own shop. He was very successful in this business and he rapidly made a small fortune. In nineteen oh six, Nessler gave his first lecture about curly hair and his theories about it. That was to an audience of European professional hair stylists. People had been using water to set their hair in curlers of some type for centuries, and when the hair dried, the curlers were removed and this hair would be curly, but only temporarily. Nessler wanted to capture that curl in the wet stage and make it permanent, and his solution to the problem was to bake alkali into it, and he had designed a machine to do that. You have seen pictures of this machine. It looks like a big sea creature looking attraption with wires that hang from the ceiling or like a chandelier kind of apparatus, and they go to every single curler on a set head of hair. So that if you've seen those pictures, that was Nestler's or one of the many copycats that sprang up. Those curlers were made of bronze. I read one report that said each of them weighed a kilo, which seems so much, and that they were counterweighted in that chandelier apparatus. And those curlers could be heated electrically or by gas. Apparently some of his early attempts used gas as the heating mechanism, and he was essentially boiling each curl on the curler with his alkali solution to set it permanently. Nessler demonstrated the first permanent wave in front of a full audience at his salon on Oxford Street on a volunteer he knew well, which was his wife, Katerina. She'd been his test subject on previous tries with this process and had gotten some hair and scalp damage before things were all worked out. Both the heat and the chemicals could and did cause burns, so she sat for what was the public premiere of the permanent wave and let the assembled crowd watch as her husband transformed her straight hair into curls. Most of the assembled hair professionals were pretty dubious of Nessler's invention. Yeah, we should also mention this took hours and hours. I've seen different numbers of hours mentioned everything from four to ten, but in any case, it was a lot of time. It's even longer than a permanent eighties. Right, coming up, we're going to talk about how challenging it was to convince consumers to adopt the permanent wave. But first we'll have a quick sponsor break. One of the hurdles that Nessler faced in bringing his process to the masses was putting potential customers minds at ease about it. Remember this was the early twentieth century, so it was coming off of decades where women largely just let their hair grow and grow and then would put it up into buns. The idea of a chemical treatment was frightening for a lot of people. It still is for a lot of people. But Nessler promised in his advertising that his process would produce a quote soft, wavy mass and never quote a frows or a flute. There really was already a strong desire and a lot of places around the world for people to have a way to permanently curl straight hair. A story that ran in a variety of Australian newspapers in the summer of nineteen oh nine, which was the same year, Nessler patented the permanent Wave mentioned that children who had been treated for ringworm with X rays had then started growing curly hair when they previously had straight hair. Then questions started rolling into the papers after that initial report from women who wondered if they could get curly hair that way. An X ray specialist named Harry W. Cox of London was consulted and his response was quote, there seems to be no reason why that not be done, provided the lady is willing to become entirely bald for a time. The X ray is the speediest depilatory known, and I suppose the fact that the fresh hair is curly has something to do with the action of the rays on the scalp. Today, we know that a big determiner of whether hair is curly or straight is the shape of the hair follicle. Symmetrical follicles that lie perpendicular to the skin generally produce straight hair, and follicles that sit at an angle to the skin are asymmetrical and curved those produce curly hair. Treatments like chemotherapy and radiation can alter hair follicles, which is why sometimes when people go through chemo and they finish it, their hair goes back curly. Yeah, they get what's called chemo curls. Also for clarity, like, it's worth noting X rays had not been around that long at this point in time. Uh, and they were not as as well understood, and they were usually a lot more dangerous in terms of exposure than they would be today. I'm like, which episode did we talk about the X ray historyan, because it was uh, yeah, there was some scary stuff, especially in the early years. Yeah. So to me, the idea that kids got X rays for ringworm that were strong enough that it changed their hair structure, I'm like, yike, yikes. So this also ties into the other problem that Nessler had in the early days of offering permanent waves. The word permanent gay some clients the impression that after having the service done, their hair would be curly forever, and Nessler had to educate his customers that new growth would not be curly. He was only able to change the texture of the hair on their head at the time of service. He also told a story to press about a pregnant client who had a permanent wave service performed and then was angry at him when her baby was born with straight hair. On the one hand, that sounds like a fanciful story, and on the other people do sometimes come up with rather wild ideas. I could talk about some of my experiences in behind the scenes. Though he had those hurdles, people really really did want curls, and Nessler became so well known and so good at them that he was often called away from London to do the hair of various royals of Europe. In nineteen fifteen, Nessler patented the artificial eyelash and a process for applying it. This involves curling each eyelash hair into and then applying a strip of mink to the lash base to create the illusion of a full lash. That same year he left London and moved to the United States, and this was precipitated by World War One, which had left him without many clients and without income. Some accounts suggest that he may have been jailed in Britain because he was German. It's a little unclear. I didn't find verification on that. He did seem to get out of Great Britain in a hurry and with very little to his name. When Nessler moved to New York City, he carried with him only one thousand dollars and his patents for his permanent wave and his false eyelashes and one thousand dollars, to be clear, was no small sum in nineteen fifteen, but he had been successful enough in his business that this would have been a pretty small slice of his financial worth, so it does seem likely that his assets may have been seized. He found out when he got to the US that there were people already making their own versions of his permanent wave machine in the US and selling them, and he was also told that there were only three hairdressers in the entire country that made enough money to pay income tax. His first shop in New York was on West forty sixth Street, and the first day he was open reported sixty two clients showed up thanks to his reputation abroad and an ad he had taken out in the New York Times, but all of them were too fearful of his permanent wave machine to actually have Nessler do their hair, so he used his contacts to get a client from London who happened to be in the city come in for a free perm As words spread that his machine was in use, a crowd gathered and By the end of the process, which took several hours, he had clients actually booking appointments. Yeah, this is the case where the length of the process probably helped him, because there was time for the word to spread that he's like very obviously doing this in his shop, and you could see it through the window and we could all go. Look. His business after that grew, and it grew really quickly. Before long he had a reported one hundred employees in another shop at six fifty seven Fifth Avenue that was catering to upscale patrons. He seems to have been a well liked boss. People called him Father Nesle. He offered things like company picnics and fancy dinners for his staff each year, and according to a nineteen thirty three New Yorker article, he distributed thirty five thousand dollars in holiday bonuses each year, just a lot. He was obviously making a lot of money. His permanent wave service cost a whopping one hundred and twenty dollars. While currency inflation calculators aren't always all that reliable, Just for the sake of a sense of how expensive this was, in twenty twenty four, it would be more than about three thousand dollars probably, although that was a huge sum of money even for the wealthy. He attracts at a regular clients hell who he fed as well as styled. One of his most famous patrons was Edith Wilson, known publicly as Missus Woodrow Wilson. His business grew so quickly that he wasn't performing any services himself in just a couple of years, but he was greeting all the clients and chatting with them as he glided through the salon during their service. Yeah, apparently he would sometimes just show up with this tray of Sandwiches'd be like, I've brought your snack during your perm which I love this idea of feeding his clients a beautiful lunch while they sit there. He also founded the Nesley Patent Holding Company, although he was still going by Nessler in his personal life. He maintained the name Charles Nesley for his business affairs, and then he started opening additional shops around New York and then spreading throughout the country in a chain. By the nineteen twenties, the permanent Wave had become wildly pops in North America, and demand for the process was so great that the beauty industry really exploded. Shops were popping up everywhere to meet the increased interest of the public, and that in turn led to two things, knockoffs of Nessler's machine and a raft of other inventions to offer various beauty treatments to customers. Like we've made it clear that he was really focused on white people's hair, but like this did include people making permanent wave machines specifically for the needs of black women's hair. As part of this whole wave of invention, there was an entire new industry born in the early nineteen teens. It was not as though people had never specialized in hair care as a professional service. We've talked, for example, about Leonard Autier, who was hairdresser to Marie Antoinette. But this was a massive change in how people thought about it. Suddenly there were entirely new prospects for both professionals and consumers. And of course this also gets tangled up in twentieth century beauty standards, and it is a self feeding loop. As more people of a wider range of socioeconomic classes gained access to new treatments and styling, those treatments became popular, and they supported and grew a whole new industry, which then kept offering new treatments and upkeep plans to keep revenue coming in. And part of marketing to people and especially women well before this and also booming during this time, was suggesting that if they did not seek out beauty treatments, they would not look right or appealing. So this is obviously an ugly cycle. On the upside, though, a whole new level of industry offered new opportunities both to companies and to the workforce. According to a Time magazine article published in nineteen fifty one, in nineteen oh eight, before the permanent wave was patented, there were approximately three thousand beauty salons in the United States. In nineteen fifty one, there were one hundred and twenty seven thousand of them, and all of them needed a full array of furniture and equipment and professionals to use that equipment, and estimated three hundred and fifty thousand people staffed these salons, and income for stylists could be more than one hundred dollars a week. That sounds really small now, but that was way above average at the time. There are some interesting additional statistics that are shared in that writeup. Average visits in nineteen fifty one ran more than five dollars and three million, seven hundred and fifty thousand women in the US visited salons each year, and to keep those customers, salons began to offer a wider and wider array of services, including things like massage, manicures, pedicures, false eyelash application, makeup application, et cetera. In nineteen twenty seven, Yvonne Loan of Los Angeles got her first permanent wave and was touted US holding a record because of it. She was the youngest person to ever have had one, at the age of eighteen months. Yeah, that record may have been broken since then, but at the time it was kind of a big deal. Nineteen twenty eight was a big year in Nessler's story, and we'll talk about his dicey book that came out that year after we hear from the sponsors that keep the show going. Nineteen twenty eight was a busy year for Charles Nessler. His book The Story of Hair, Its Purpose and Preservation published that year, and it is not exactly what you might expect in a book about hair. Nesler lets the reader know this isn't just going to be about coiffure. In the preface writing quote Between the day when I began to learn at firsthand about the phenomena of human hair and the time in which I have been writing this book, many things have happened in my chosen field of research. Indeed, many of these things I have helped to happen. The physical and mental sciences have been my aids, and the new viewpoints on the subject of human hair which I set forth here have been the result of the combination of scientific and psychological study. In nineteen oh five I brought forth my invention of the permanent way. Twenty years later came still another and vastly more important discovery, that of classification of hair according to texture. So so far that seems fairly normal and interesting, But the next couple of paragraphs hints at some of the problems to come. Quote. For years, in many countries and among many classes of people, I have sought the truth about human hair. I have been on terms of intimacy in every stratum of society. I have visited innumerable institutions, hospitals, orphanages, prisons, schools, and factories, studying the relationship between the individuals. I have found and the hair on their heads. With the passage of years, observations became theories, and theories verified themselves until they became conclusions. My hair research left the field of science and entered the realm of psychology. Okay, so that slightly eyebrow raising that Tracy just read really sets up the meat of his book, which is filled with concepts that he claims to have worked out logically. He talks, for example, a lot about evolution in the book, although as much as he talks about science, he seems to be working exclusively from his own conclusions and not referring to the work of evolutionary scientists. He has an entire chapter on the body hair that people usually begin to grow during adolescence as part of their secondary sex characteristics, But instead of treating this whole discussion in a scientific way, he introduces a character named Gonad, who he describes as quote, a messenger of uncertain purpose. He turns out to be a troublemaker and a peace to He goes on, quote Gonad has an important task and he means to do it in an artistic way. So obviously this is a weird book. I don't know any other way to describe it. He also makes a lot of bold and flatly incorrect claims in this chapter about sexuality and hair, and about how older women trick men into marrying them by appearing younger, which Nessler says is reducing the human race. He also talks about how some races have lower sex drives than others, and how men with beards are the ones who sustain the human race. There's a lot of nonsense. He also states a lot of falsehoods about various cultures as though they are objective truths, and a lot of them are gross and bigoted and demonstrably untrue. This book also has a chapter called hair and Obesity, which is also full of falsehoods that are stated as fact, like he believed that so called weak hair was somehow connected to obesity. He notes that different people have different dietary needs and that it can be difficult to find the right balance, but he also makes a lot of really demeaning statements about people's weight. He suggests that every person who in his mind, was carrying extra weight was more comfortable blaming anything but their diet for adding these pounds. He does also put forth that this is a cultural problem where humans have become accustomed to pleasing their palettes instead of just listening to their instincts. When it comes to selecting food, he seems to think a little adversity will keep a person's hair healthier. This is a weird, weird chapter on its own, but especially so in the context of a book about hair. It starts to feel like Nessler kind of wanted a way to justify fat shaming by claiming this was all part of his scientific observation. There are so many more bad takes in this book. There's one that reads, quote, the weak haared child will remain all its life weak in ambition what And there's a whole chapter about child rearing that is set up with the conceit that if children came with manuals, that chapter is the manual, right down to calling the child the machine throughout. Usually when I read a book like this for the show, I'll be like, it's an interesting read, even if you don't agree with it, And I'm like, maybe, don't even bother with this one. In the final chapter, almost like a grand finale, he talks about the permanent wave. He explains the theory in the science behind his permanent wave. If you curl damp hair and let it dry. It will retain the curl until it gets wet again. So Nessler explains his way to capture that curl effect in a more permanent way. As he explains, quote briefly, the application of a permanent wave consists of boiling the hair in an alcaloil solution while it is tightly wound on a curling rod. There is no solution in existence which can be used equally for all hair, since all hair is not alike. He goes on to explain that hair that is naturally very porous will take up the perm solution more quickly, which sounds like a benefit, but that it's also more prone to breakage. He describes this system that he developed in nineteen twenty six to classify hair by its porosity into ten groups, called the Textometer. A couple of caveats to this, though, Nessler warns that hair that has been chemically treated with dyes can be difficult to classify. Also, as Holly set up at the top of the show, this classification system was really only applied to the hair of white people. Yeah, he's so close where He's like, Hey, different textures have different needs, but then he's like, no, no, I'm just talking about the white ladies in my clientele. Even the New Yorker and a pretty flattering piece about Sessler, written five years after this book was published, calls it quote a rambling philosophic treatise on the relationship of hair to health, virility, character, and morals. And as for Nessler's scientific street cred that same write up states quote, in scientific circles he is regarded as at least interesting. Some of his ideas are regarded with cold suspicion, even misgiving. Also in nineteen twenty eight, Nessler was embroiled in a legal battle with the Lemour Company over patent infringement. Lamurr was based out of Cleveland and had made copies of Nessler's permanent wave machines and other products. As the litigation mounted, la Murrer offered to buy Nessler out for a million dollars cash plus stock. Nessler sold Nesley to Lemore, and the newly merged firms became Nesley Lemurr Company. Initially, Nessler took that cash and he seemed to kind of retire, at least from actively taking clients. He was still tinkering in his lab on various projects. He kept that lab in the city, but then his home was a huge estate in New Jersey. But he lost a lot of his fortune in the nineteen twenty nine stock market crash, and he was spurred to try to invent new hair care processes and technologies to bring in additional money. In the nineteen thirties, the cold wave was introduced. No longer did a customer have to be hooked up to a machine that ran current to their setting curls. Once the cold wave was invented, it wasn't long before the home permanent was brought to market. The home perm quickly gained popularity, and women even formed clubs and groups where they would perm each other's hair instead of going to the salon to save money. There are reports that I read that said that Nessler introduced a home perm years and years and years before this, But I'm like, but how, because cold perms weren't invented yet, and I could never find out what exactly was going on there. So this rise in popularity of home perms caused such a wave of concern in the salon world that the beauty industry actually lobbied lawmakers in the hopes of making home perms illegal. That did not work, but there was soon a pivot because when it became apparent that a lot of people getting home perms ended up with damaged hair and permanent curls that did not look like what they expected or wanted, the beauty industry seized the opportunity to book corrective treatments. That same idea of corrective services was soon also offered for hair color when it became available for home application. In nineteen forty eight, US beauty shops had gross sales of one point two billion dollars, which, according to a Life magazine article from nineteen fifty one, was just a little shy of the money made by movie theaters. The magazine gave Nessler credit for ushering in the new era of beauty shops and what they offered, noting specifically the permanent wave, but also alluding to the culture of beauty shops being a place that quote transformed the social life of women, giving them a club where they could read fashion magazines, bear their souls to sympathetic hairdressers, and pick up fascinating gossip about other bared souls. In nineteen forty nine, the American Women's Voluntary Services honored Nessler, noting that he had created jobs for a lot of women in the beauty industry under the award's umbrella language of enhancing the quote economic, cultural, and social prestige of women to contextualize this award. This was the same year that organization under that same umbrella recognized Vassar's president and Helen Keller with awards. In the nineteen forties. Nessler wanted to keep innovating, but he went down a lot of paths that were costly and unsuccessful. One of these was a massaging machine he invented, which promised to keep the skin looking youthful. Nessler died of a heart attack in January nineteen fifty one at the age of seventy eight. He was in his home in New Jersey when it happened. The year before he died, and estimated sixty eight million people in the United States had permanent wave services. In his career, he had invented combs for giving temporary waves, a baldness remedy, and a treatment to add curl to the hair of babies, among others. Yeah, we didn't get into all his patents, but it's a lot of them which is why we didn't get into them. It was just like one hair thing after another. He did a lot of beauty treatments. He didn't ever really remake his fortune, unfortunately. But that is Charles Nessler, who is another one that I just find completely engaging. I have another listener mail about Olympic sports. People love the Olympics. This is from our listener Laura that writes, Hi, Tracy and Holly, I love your show and I really love the recent episode on Olympic sports no longer in the Olympics. Funnily enough, I ran into this blurb from book Riot today on how writing was once considered an Olympic sport. I would love more info if you have room, and if there's enough info available to do an episode on writing as an Olympic sport, plus or minus other strange no longer in the Olympics events. Thanks for your wonderful show. Yeah, it might happen. I mentioned in our defunct Olympics or maybe it was behind the scenes that I did want to do one on the arts aspect of the Olympics. Yeah, that was an entire thing. It's on the list, yeah, and I think probably it will eventually become an episode, but I don't know when, but thank you for listening and for hanging in there. It might be a couple of years, Laura, but I promise I'm working on or at least I have it on my list. If you would like to write to us to make a request of a subject, or just talk about something that sparked your interest on the show, you can do that at History Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com. If you would like to subscribe and you haven't gotten around to it yet, there's no time like the present. You can do that on the iHeartRadio app, or anywhere you listen to your favorite shows. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.