who invented nose hair trimmers?

Ah, nose hair. It saves the respiratory system from the vilest of fiends, but when grown too floral, it turns the wearer into one. Cheers, then, for the nose hair trimmer, that delightful invention that takes the guesswork and crudity out of the most delicate truncating task a face faces.

The nose hair trimmer was invented in 1859 by Dr. Jefferson Entwistle of Kennebunkport, a botanist by trade and barber by night. His earliest model was powered by foot-bellows. The user would step in place on the bellows while trimming, and the forced air would spin a propeller-shaped blade, which the user would gently apply to the nostril region.

The mechanism, notoriously unstable, disappeared from use after a series of high-profile accidents and litigation. Legend says that Abraham Lincoln grew his beard at a schoolgirl's request, but an obscure passage of his diary cryptically hints at a less jocund explanation:

I shall have to cover the scar. The scar of the great dissension we now face. The face of an angel, mangled by a mawkish mane. The better angels of our nature? Ah, it sounds foolish. Dam'd bellows!

Not until Edison blanketed the world in glowing electricity would a nose hair trimmer resurface to public acclaim, breaking into the market in 1902 and dominating the men's grooming landscape ever since.




[sixty-second in a series]