In America
The flat winding crosses the Atlantic
The flat winding that Josef Mayer perfected in Karlsbad in the winter of 1923/24 was a European invention. The industry it became was, above all, American. Within a year of its first presentation, an Ohio entrepreneur had licensed the system, built a factory in Cincinnati, and begun turning out the chrome-and-Bakelite machines that would make the croquignole wave the standard of the American salon. This page follows Mayer's system across the Atlantic — through a decade of explosive commercial success, a campaign of patent litigation that reached the federal courts, the wartime chemistry that made the machines obsolete, and the two very different legacies that survived him.
Cincinnati, 1925: an industry is licensed
In 1925 the American entrepreneur Philip D. Spaeth recognised the commercial potential of Mayer's flat-winding method and founded the Realistic Permanent Wave Machine Company. He chose Cincinnati, Ohio — more precisely the industrial enclave of Norwood — for his factory. The choice was no accident: since the 1890s, driven by firms such as the Andrew Jergens Company, Cincinnati had grown into one of America's principal centres for soaps, cosmetics, and personal-care goods, with the transport, the skilled workforce, and the supplier networks that scaling a new machine required.
The company began as an importer and distributor of Mayer's equipment. Within a few years it was manufacturing the heavy chrome-and-Bakelite machines in Norwood itself, under direct licence from Karlsbad. A craft innovation devised in a Bohemian spa town was, through American capital and organisation, becoming a mass-produced industry.
Commercial explosion
Three thousand machines, and a new standard.
Between 1927 and 1930, by the account placed before a federal court in 1932, more than three thousand Realistic machines were sold in the United States for revenue approaching a million dollars. The croquignole wave became the dominant standard of the American salon, and the company invested heavily — in training, in marketing, and in the spectacular promotions at national conventions that carried the brand into the 1950s.
The patent estate, and the Philad Company
Mayer did not sell his American rights to the Cincinnati manufacturer. He transferred his essential United States patents to the Philad Company — a corporation registered in Cleveland, Ohio, and in Delaware, whose business was the holding and licensing of the patent estate rather than the running of salons. Philad licensed a restricted group of equipment manufacturers — about eighteen of them — fixed minimum prices for clamps, curling rods, pads, and heaters, and allowed those licensees to pass the process on to salons that bought their equipment. In its structure it resembles what would now be called a non-practicing patent entity; the stronger claim that it was simply a "patent troll" goes beyond what the surviving record establishes.
The estate rested on three American inventions, protected across several original and reissue patents:
| Patent | Granted | What it protected | Fate |
|---|---|---|---|
| US 1,619,794 (reissued RE 17,585) |
1927; reissue 1930 |
The sectional electric heater — two halves closing around the wound strand. | Claims 4–7 disclaimed by Philad in 1933; statutory term ended 1944. |
| US 1,622,957 (reissued RE 17,393, then RE 18,841) |
1927; second reissue 1933 |
The waving method — the process of flat-strand, end-to-scalp winding itself. | All claims held invalid, D. Del. 1941; affirmed 3d Cir. 1942. |
| US 1,894,612 | 1933 | The apparatus — insulating clamp, winding rod, ratchet tensioner. | Unaffected by the 1941 ruling; term ended January 1950. |
The single most important — and the most fiercely litigated — was the method patent, RE 18,841. It claimed not a machine but the process itself: dividing the hair into flat strands, clamping one near the scalp, winding it from the free end toward the clamp, and heating it.
The campaign against the salons
Philad's most remarkable strategy was to demand licences not only from rival manufacturers but from the users of the method — individual beauty shops and hairdressers across the country. After a 1939 decision weakened its ability to sue the sellers of competing equipment, Philad turned its attention directly to the salons. The record of the federal court in 1940 described the campaign in figures:
Philad's salon licence campaign (per the 1940 court record)
- Annual licence fee
- about $12
- Salons of the hairdressers' association
- roughly 5,000
- Reported infringement suits
- 57 (27 in Ohio, 30 in California)
- Expected annual revenue
- about $60,000
The demands were said to reach shops using other manufacturers' machines, and some entirely "machineless" waving systems. What makes the episode historically unusual is not a quarrel between industrial competitors but an early, systematic attempt to enforce a patent against thousands of small businesses — an effort that would provoke one of the formative class actions of American patent law.
The patent wars, 1932–1944
The American legal history was not a simple march toward defeat. Over twelve years the courts first upheld, then narrowed, then finally destroyed the central method patent.
Naivette v. Bishinger. The Court of Appeals upheld important aspects of Mayer's method — the combination solved a genuine practical problem and had achieved conspicuous commercial success — but it invalidated key claims covering the heater and clamp, treating them as anticipated by earlier work or as ordinary mechanical skill.
The court explicitly rejected the argument that Mayer was "the father of the Croquignole wave": winding hair from the ends toward the scalp, it found, was already known from wig-making, earlier patents, and salon practice.
Johnson Co. v. Philad. The court upheld several claims of RE 18,841 and found infringement, though it struck down claim 6. Croquignole curling itself was old, the court accepted, but Mayer's practical arrangement for applying it to the human head was, in the surviving claims, patentable.
Philad Co. v. Lechler Laboratories. The court did not decide whether the patent was valid. It refused to help Philad enforce it — because Philad was using a process patent to suppress competition in unpatented clamps, rods, pads, and heaters. A process patent, the court held, did not give Philad a monopoly over every tool capable of being used in the process. The ruling is an important early statement of the patent-misuse doctrine.
National Hairdressers' & Cosmetologists' Ass'n v. Philad Co. The association, representing about five thousand salons, together with Fred the Hair Stylist, Inc., asked the court to declare RE 18,841 invalid and to bar Philad from continuing its threats. Judge Biggs held every claim of the patent invalid.
Affirmed. The Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit adopted Judge Biggs's opinion (129 F.2d 1020). Philad was restrained from enforcing the patent against the represented salons.
The patent is sold. The remaining dispute was declared moot: the patent had been sold under a court order in another proceeding, and Philad no longer held title. The published record does not name the purchaser, the price, or the proceeding that authorised the sale — so it cannot be said, as proven fact, that this was an insolvency liquidation. In any event the patent had already been held invalid, and the underlying term would have expired in 1944 regardless.
The paradox: his own British patent
The most arresting feature of the 1941 judgment is the reason it gave for the defeat. A divisional application can claim its parent's filing date only for subject matter the parent actually disclosed. The court found that Mayer's original American application of 19 March 1925 had not disclosed the decisive sequence — flat-strand winding, clamped at the scalp, rolled turn over turn from the free end. That matter entered only through a divisional application filed in September 1926. It was new matter; it could not borrow the 1925 date.
Once the divisional lost that date, the path was open to prior art — and the most damaging piece of prior art was Mayer's own. His British patent, GB 251,688, filed on 4 February 1925 and published the following year, disclosed essentially the same sequence. A competing application by Robert Bishinger was also treated as earlier art. The court was not persuaded that Mayer had been the first to invent the claimed process under the American rules then in force.
Mayer's foreign protection proved that the process existed — and then became the very evidence that undid his American claims. Few histories of invention show so clearly how the fate of a technology can turn on the filing of a paper.
The cold wave, and the war
Even as the lawyers argued over the thermal-process patents, the laboratories were already preparing their obsolescence. In 1932 researchers produced the first chemical "cold wave": reducing agents such as sulfite broke the disulphide bonds of the hair at room temperature, and an oxidiser set them again in the new shape. No electric heaters, no ratchet tension, no chrome-and-Bakelite machinery.
The Second World War was the catalyst. Chrome, steel, and aluminium, and the electrical components on which the machines depended, were rationed for armaments. The manufacture of new Realistic machines effectively stopped; broken equipment grew hard to repair; and salons were pushed toward the chemistry that needed none of it.
To keep the Cincinnati company alive, Philip D. Spaeth made a drastic pivot — away from low-margin hardware and toward the chemical consumables of the professional salon: cold-wave preparations, shampoos, conditioners, and sprays. The redirection carried the firm through the disruption and established it, through the 1950s, as a significant supplier to the American salon trade.
Two legacies of the name
The postwar settlement completed the separation of the two branches that had grown from a single invention. Their fates could hardly have been more different.
Revlon, and a caution
In the United States, the Realistic company prospered under Spaeth as a specialist supplier of professional products. The cosmetics house Revlon, pursuing entry into the professional salon market, is said — in secondary corporate histories — to have purchased the firm around 1960. That much is a documented "Realistic" brand and corporate lineage. What the available sources do not establish is any chain of title from Mayer's patents to Revlon: Revlon's own corporate histories do not record the acquisition, and the link from the Philad estate to the Cincinnati company remains unproven. The Realistic name lived on in cosmetics; the patent estate did not demonstrably follow it.
The Czech furnaces
The European branch travelled a stranger road. Confiscated, nationalised, and reassigned to a planned economy, the Karlovy Vary factory abandoned hairdressing altogether and became — improbably — a manufacturer of industrial electric furnaces, a lineage that survives today as Realistic, a.s. Read that story →
Realistic Avenue
Of the American enterprise there survives one stubborn, literal trace in the city it helped to build. When Spaeth expanded the Norwood factory, it stood at 3640 Realistic Avenue — the adjoining road having taken the company's name in recognition of the hundreds of jobs the plant created. For years the site served as a parking lot. Then Cincinnati Public Radio acquired the corner of Dana and Realistic Avenues, broke ground in 2023 on a new two-storey headquarters, and opened it in 2025 as the home of the stations WVXU and WGUC. In April 2025 the corner was ceremonially renamed Beverly Kinney Way. The historic name — Realistic Avenue — still sits on the city's plats, the last physical relic of an empire of curls.
What survived
Seen whole, the American chapter is the clearest expression of a pattern that runs through Josef Mayer's entire life: a man who repeatedly created value, and repeatedly lost control of it. He devised the system; others built the industry; the courts narrowed the patents; the war displaced the machines; and the name passed into hands he never chose.
Yet traces of him endured, scattered and surprising:
- the American patent records, and the specifications in his own hand;
- a line of federal decisions — Naivette, Johnson, Lechler, and National Hairdressers — still cited in the law of patents and class actions;
- the Realistic brand, carried into the Revlon group;
- Realistic Avenue, in Norwood, Ohio;
- the Czech company, Realistic, a.s., still standing on the site of his factory; and
- most quietly, the everyday method of winding short hair from its ends toward the scalp — his, whoever the courts said first conceived it.
The "realistic wave" he gave the world outlived the patents, the factories, and the man. In America, as in Europe, his name outlived his control of it.
Sources and further reading
The original patent filings, drawings and all, are held locally:
- US 1,619,794 — the flat-winding sectional heater.
- US RE 17,585 — its reissue.
- US RE 18,841 — the waving method, the litigated patent.
- US 1,894,612 — the clamp, curler, and ratchet apparatus.
- GB 251,688 — the British filing that became the prior art against RE 18,841.
- FR 593,464 — the French member of the family.
- BE 335,190 — the Belgian member of the family.
The federal decisions and the wider history are documented in:
- Naivette v. Bishinger, 61 F.2d 433 (6th Cir. 1932) — Justia
- Johnson Co. v. Philad Co., 96 F.2d 442 (9th Cir. 1938) — Justia
- Philad Co. v. Lechler Laboratories, 107 F.2d 747 (2d Cir. 1939) — Justia
- National Hairdressers' & Cosmetologists' Ass'n v. Philad Co., 34 F. Supp. 264 (D. Del. 1940) & 41 F. Supp. 701 (D. Del. 1941), aff'd 129 F.2d 1020 (3d Cir. 1942) — Justia
- They Built a City: 150 Years of Industrial Cincinnati — Cincinnati Library
- Revlon and the Realistic brand — Cosmetics and Skin
- Realistic, a.s. — realistic.cz
- Cincinnati Public Radio at Realistic Avenue — WVXU