Humping It

Here are some more nice hairpins still in their original cellophane!  I looked up the patent holder, Solomon Harry Goldberg, owner of the Hump Hairpin Manufacturing Company, and it seems he was a busy fellow.  In addition to these hairpins, patented in 1903 while he lived in Danville, IL,  he also was involved with collar buttons. In 1909 he improved his hairpin.

Here is a patent for a new improved hairpin box from 1922, and a hairpin container from 1923.

He got pretty whimsical with this hairpin holder from 1909.  Seems you spread apart the strands and stick the hairpins in the skirt.  That would be a fun thing to find!

With the success of his hairpins he had another brilliant idea for a safety pin built along those same lines.  His explanation says it enables more material to be pinned all the way to the end, and would lie flatter.  I have never seen one of these.

A man who worked for him patented a hairpin forming machine.

Things were going good until Irene Castle bobbed her hair.  Solomon regrouped and called his invention a bobby pin and kept accumulating his fortune.  At the end of this article is a rather long scholarly essay on bobby pins that mentions Solomon H Goldberg's contribution near the end.

And here we have it:  the modern bobby pin, patented in 1929.



Cards to sell them on.

In the 1930 census, Sol H Goldberg, born 1885,  and his wife, Ruth, their three children, the oldest 7 years old, three maids, a nurse, and a governess are living in Chicago, IL.  With all that money, he is renting an apartment at Jackson Tower Apartments for $1000 a month.  He is a Manufacturer and financier, Hairpins, etc.  He was born in Ohio, his parents Germany and Austria, and Ruth was from Vilna, Poland.

In the 1920 census he is lodging in Chicago, IL with his two sisters although he is marked as married.  He is a Manufacturer of hairpins.  He was born in 1881.

In 1910 he is the head of a household that includes his brother and sisters and he is a Manufacturer of Roofing and Req Supplies.  That answers the question I had when I was reading the patents.  I kept seeing shingles and roofing apparatus being patented by a Solomon H Goldberg of Chicago and assumed it was a different man.  So in 1910 he had patented his hairpin and improved it and was still running the roofing business and hedging his bets.  He was also involved in the retreading of tires in 1920.  He also invented several means of packaging fragile items.  A busy man.

Here's what he did before.  He also invented a machine to print the design on sheets of asphault.