razor blades

Not just hotels but houses too. There would be a slot inside the medicine cabinet for disposing razors into the wall. Dude who came up with the idea was probably like, "we'll all be dead from nuclear bombs before any of these fill up or needs to be renovated".

A small blade safe can hold hundreds of blades and it's like 4"x3"x3". Makes sense they thought the inside of drywall 5'x3'x1' would be fine. It can probably hold tens of thousands. Even with a new blade daily that's decades. And when you tear down the wall you're dealing with Sheetrock, nails and screws already. All that time would have dulled the incredibly thin blades.

This is all to say: it seems wild but was a decent idea.

Safety razors with disposable blades were introduced about 120 years ago, at one blade a day that's a bit less than 45000 blades

Double edged blades dimensions are: 0.1mm x 42.7mm x 22mm for 98.21mm³

45 000 blades would take a volume of 4 419 450mm³ or about 270in³

A regular indoor wall is made of 2x4 and each stud is 14.5 inches apart (16 inches on center). A 2x4 is in truth 1.5" x 3.5" so each inch of height inside the wall is 3.5 x 14.5 x 1 which is 50.75in³

45 000 blades stacked perfectly would therefore use 270 / 50.75 = 5.32 inches of the wall's height... So even if they didn't stack perfectly, it's pretty safe to assume that there's enough space inside the wall for hundreds of years at one blade a day (especially since old houses usually used true 2x4 and had their studs at 24" on center)

This was behind the medicine cabinet in my house.

A hole in a steamy bathrooms wall where you dispose wet things full of human skin cells sounds like a mold-hotel.
And if there are kids around, they put everything small enough inside.

Wall full of tetanus.

I think this is the first real TIL for me in ages.

Remodeling contractors hate this one trick..

We used to have a Victorian era house with one of these. We had to replace that wall in the bathroom and there was this huge pile of rusty razor blades in the wall. Had to use tongs to pick them up for disposal.

Multiple homes I've lived in have had these slots in the medicine cabinets lol.

Did they anticipate people not living long enough to care? Or that some biome would form to use the blades as food?

Interesting decisions all around.

Where do they go? To the Oubliette.

I use those blades in present day.

When I put in a new blade, I keep the wax paper wrapper, then rewrap the discarded blade in said wax paper before discarding it.

Give or take twelve years into this endeavor, I've had zero issues with this system.

I had an old house with one of those. I renovated the bathroom so I can confirm they all go into the wall. God what a mess. 2ft of rusty used razor blades wedged in there.

Yeah we had a 1920s house with a metal medicine cabinet above the sink. It had the razor blade slot and yeah they literally fell into the wall between the studs.

I've come across one or two walls full of blades doing basement renos.

Once saw a video of someone who forged a knife from old razor blades he found in a wall. There were hundreds. They shaved more often in the old days I presume...

If I had this in my home, I would draw a face around this "mouth".

R/definitelyputyourdickinthat

I still use safety razors. I get all excited when I'm at a bathroom that I can slip one in the wall.

so it's the graveyard of razorblades?

razorgraves?

Curious as to why this fell out of fashion?

My dad's workplace had something similar in the 1960s-70s. It was a plane hangar that was used by the baggage handlers.

The walls were cinder block so hollow from top to bottom, they would open up the boxes of the mini alcohol bottles that would go on the planes and take handfuls of them out, once the bottles were empty they would dump them down the same hole until they actually filled one up then started on a new one.

That would have been a surprise when that hangar got demolished and that wall opened up.

Haven’t seen it mentioned, maybe I didn’t look hard enough. Wouldn’t this be a huge problem for water damage and mold between the walls? All I can think about is all that shower water + steam getting in there

Wet shaving is still very much a thing; in fact in the last decade or so, it's had a renaissance of sorts (tho it was probably re-gaining popularity already in the early 00's). I've been a wet shaver for 2.5 years but decided to buy me an electric shaver because these days I have less time for wet shaving. It can done be quickly but what's the point if you've got to rush it. Links for those who got curious:

https://www.badgerandblade.com/forum/

https://www.badgerandblade.com/forum/media/

https://sharpologist.com/

[email protected]