You might recognize the name Schick from your bathroom cabinet, but long before it became a household brand, it belonged to a man from Ottumwa, Iowa with a knack for invention and a military record to match.
Jacob Schick was born in Ottumwa and didn’t waste any time making his mark. By the late 1890s, he found himself in New Mexico, managing a railroad line to a coal mine owned by his father. But history had other plans. When the Spanish-American War broke out in 1898, Schick enlisted with the 14th Infantry Regiment, eventually shipping out to the Philippines with the 8th Army Corps.
He served with distinction and rose to the rank of Second Lieutenant, but like many soldiers at the time, illness cut his service short. Shipped home with dysentery, Schick found himself bedridden—and that’s where lightning struck. With plenty of time on his hands and not much strength for a traditional shave, the idea of a mechanized razor first sparked.
Once he recovered, Schick continued serving—this time laying down telegraph lines in the wilds of Alaska, no easy feat in the early 1900s. He left the military in 1910 but re-enlisted six years later as World War I loomed large. By the time he left service again, he had been promoted to Lieutenant Colonel.
But the real revolution was still to come.
Back home, Schick got serious about razors. Inspired by the loading mechanism of a repeating rifle, he designed a razor that used injection cartridges—no more fiddling with loose blades. His first major venture, the Magazine Repeating Razor Company, was just the beginning. He soon began refining the idea of an electric razor, putting together a series of patents that would lead to the real breakthrough: on May 13, 1930, Schick received the final patent for his electric razor, changing personal grooming forever.
And he didn’t stop there. Schick also dreamed up and patented a boat designed for shallow water navigation, known as the General Jacobs Boat, and even came up with a better pencil sharpener.
Today, Jacob Schick is remembered as a pioneer—not just in shaving, but in American ingenuity. His story blends wartime grit, frontier engineering, and a spark of innovation that continues to buzz to this day.
