Charles Nessler’s Permanent Waves

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
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

(00:24):
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

(00:44):
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

(01:06):
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

(01:29):
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,

(01:51):
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

(02:13):
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

(02:37):
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

(02:59):
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.

(03:19):
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

(03:43):
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

(04:08):
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

(04:29):
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,

(04:52):
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

(05:15):
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

(05:35):
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

(06:00):
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

(06:22):
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

(06:48):
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

(07:09):
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

(07:30):
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

(07:51):
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

(08:12):
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

(08:33):
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

(08:54):
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

(09:16):
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

(09:37):
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

(09:58):
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,

(10:20):
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,

(10:44):
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

(11:09):
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.

(11:31):
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

(11:54):
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

(12:17):
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

(12:38):
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

(13:01):
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,

(13:22):
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

(13:44):
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

(14:07):
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,

(14:28):
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

(14:49):
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

(15:10):
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

(15:33):
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.

(15:54):
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

(16:15):
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

(16:36):
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

(17:00):
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.

(17:21):
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

(17:43):
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

(18:04):
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

(18:25):
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

(18:48):
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

(19:12):
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

(19:34):
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

(19:55):
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

(20:19):
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

(20:41):
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

(21:03):
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

(21:25):
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,

(21:49):
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.

(22:09):
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

(22:30):
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

(22:50):
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.

(23:14):
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

(23:37):
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

(23:59):
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

(24:21):
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

(24:41):
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

(25:02):
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,

(25:24):
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

(25:48):
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,

(26:09):
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

(26:32):
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

(26:52):
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

(27:16):
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

(27:39):
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

(27:59):
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

(28:19):
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

(28:42):
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

(29:05):
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,

(29:26):
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.

(29:46):
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

(30:06):
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

(30:28):
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

(30:51):
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

(31:12):
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

(31:33):
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

(31:56):
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

(32:19):
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

(32:41):
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

(33:05):
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

(33:26):
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

(33:46):
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

(34:09):
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

(34:30):
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

(34:52):
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

(35:18):
production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.

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Tracy V. Wilson

Holly Frey

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Charles Nessler’s Permanent Waves