Hair perm machine leads to black female inventor

The monstrous machine with the painfully looking tentacles was the first thing that captured my eye when I entered the auction house. It looked like a lamp with a round dirty globe, but I wasn’t sure about the dusty wires tied together in a clump and hanging from the rim.

I bypassed it to look at other familiar items in the box-lot room, but found myself back at the curious-looking contraption. I was staring at it dumbfounded – rounding it on all sides for a better look – when a man walked up. “Looks like a torture machine,” he said. He was joking, basing his comment purely on looks because he then told me what the machine was.

A hair styling machine for women. From the 1940s, he surmised. That made the thing even more menacing. I couldn’t imagine sitting underneath something that looked like it emitted enough electricity to make your hair stand on your head like some wild thing from a B-movie.

“I wouldn’t want to sit under it,” he said, apparently reading my mind. He picked up one of the clips, and held it open so we both could see how it clamped onto the hair.

Once he identified the machine, I realized that he was right – interestingly, several men knew that it was a hair perm machine. A website I later checked showed the machine being used in several movies and TV shows, including an episode of “I Love Lucy.”

When I began researching the machine, I came across another fascinating bit of information: The first hair perm machine was patented in 1928 by an African American woman who worked for the famed Madame C.J. Walker and her hair-products company. The inventor, Marjorie Stewart Joyner, was one of Walker’s top reps, traveling the country to demonstrate products, open beauty schools and, it seemed, becoming as much the face of the company as the woman herself.

Joyner was trying to find a way to make perms last a little longer for black women when she came up with the idea for the machine. Shops had been using hot curling irons, but as any black woman knows, pressed hair does not remain pressed for very long.

She is said to have had the brainstorm while cooking a pot roast and observing the rods that heated the roast from the inside, according to several repeated accounts. She spent two years working on the machine and in 1928 got it patented. She called it the “Permanent Wave Machine,” with heat traveling along electrical wires from a hood into the rods to press the hair.

The machine was an instant hit not only among black women but white women as well. It would keep women’s hair permed for days and even weeks. Duart was the manufacturer’s name on the machine at the auction, and the San Francisco-based company was apparently one of more than a dozen that made them. I couldn’t determine when the machines began to be mass-produced by companies like Duart, but the first beauty shop ad I saw touting a new Duart permanent wave machine was in 1929.

I found newspaper ads from the 1930s and 1940s for beauty shops from New York to Wisconsin to Oregon that also had the new machines (as one noted, with temperatures of 212 degrees). One shop had a Duart representative on hand for three days to do women’s perms and set them up with a new hair style.

“The Duart wave is the choice of Hollywood stars,” according to a 1936 article about a South Boston beauty salon. Said a 1929 beauty shop ad: “You’ll like the Duart – with curly ends.” “The Shelton – the permanent wave with the flat, marcel effect.” Shelton was another wave-machine maker.

Unfortunately for Joyner, she reaped no monetary benefit from her invention. She sold the rights to Walker for one dollar, according to the 2003 book “Styling Jim Crow: African American Beauty Training during Segregation.” Jones also developed a scalp treatment to use with the machine because the process for relaxing the hair was rather painful. She also sold the rights to that product to Walker.

Joyner was born in Virginia, and in 1906 moved with her father to Chicago where her mother had migrated, according to “Styling Jim Crow.” As a teenager, she paid her own way to attend a white beauty school and opened her own shop after graduating. She heard about Walker from her mother-in-law, who paid the cost for her to learn how to process the curly hair of African American women.

Joyner taught Walker about marcel waves and hair weaving, which she had learned at beauty school. Impressed with Joyner, Walker asked her to join her company to sell products, recruit agents and eventually set up business schools.

Not only an employee, Joyner was said to also have been a friend of Walker’s, becoming national supervisor of the company after Walker’s death in 1919. Joyner made many contacts in her position and her travels, becoming friends with educator and activist Mary McLeod Bethune and a founding member of Bethune’s National Council of Negro Women.

In 1987, a reconstruction of a Joyner’s first beauty shop in Chicago was included as part of a Smithsonian Institution exhibition of the African American migration from the South to the North in the early 20th century.

Joyner died in 1994 at age 86, and her papers – including business records and photographs – are housed at the Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection of Afro-American History and Literature at the Chicago Public Library.

”There’s not an ounce of hatred or animosity in my heart, ” Joyner told a reporter in 1987 at the time of the exhibit – looking back over her life as a child in the South to her years as a Walker rep.