Gem and Ever-Ready are two names on one company, and the company is the American Safety Razor Corporation. Neither brand used a date code and neither used a serial number that anyone can read today. What exists instead is a single, long, year-by-year chronology of models, compiled by a collector and corrected by the community that uses it, and it is the best document the American single-edge world has.
A chart of models, not of numbers
The important thing to understand about the chart is what its rows contain. Each row is a model or a set with the year or the window in which that model was made. There is no column in which you enter a mark and get a year. That shapes every answer: the input is a model name or a set description, and the output is a window, which is precisely what this archive returns.
The chart is also a single authorial work. It was published in a forum thread and mirrored on a reference site, and while the community corrects it, it remains one compiler's reading of the surviving evidence. That is a milestone table rather than a maker's own publication, and it is honest to say so.
The patent wording: the practical key
The most usable dating device in the family is not a code at all, it is the wording of the patent inscription on the razor. Pat. Applied For marks the earlier state of a design and Patented marks the later one, and the documented pair for the same razor is 1919 against 1924. When two otherwise identical razors from a set are quoted at different years, that is usually the reason. It is a division between two variants rather than a year for either, and it is worth knowing before you buy.
The models, era by era
- 1898 to 1902. The Kampfe Bros Star sets such as The Favorite, The Tourist, The Dandy and The Traveling, all wedge-blade razors, and the HR numbered models.
- 1903 to 1906. The Yankee company, with the One-Piece tubular handle and the Three Star trademark, then the renaming to Ever-Ready, then the merger with Gem to form the American Safety Razor Company in 1906.
- 1912 to 1919. The Gem Jr. Damaskeene with its open comb in 1912, the One Dollar Outfit and the Little Lather Catcher, and the hinged-cap designs that were sold as the 1914 and the 1924.
- 1930 to 1937. The Micromatic in its open-comb form and then its one-piece form, the mass model of the decade, with the plate bumps as a way of separating the variants.
- 1941 to 1953. The Flying Wing, advertised heavily from 1947 and also known as the Bullet Tip, and the Feather Weight, which the chart records as a 50th Anniversary Special in 1951 and which a second source revises in 1953.
- 1953 to 1963. The British Natural Angle, which is the Feather Weight as made on this side of the Atlantic, and the Push-Button or Contour, which the chart ends with.
The Ever-Ready wrinkle: two countries, two endings
Ever-Ready is the same chronology with a jurisdictional complication. The brand starts as the Yankee company, becomes Ever-Ready in 1905 and merges into the American Safety Razor Company in 1906. The American trademark then lapses: the chart says it ceases in the United States in 1931, while a forum source puts the last American use at 1933, with the E-Bar. The British line is separate and longer: Ever-Ready Razor Products Ltd was founded in England in 1908, and the British production carries on after the American mark has gone.
The consequence for a buyer is practical. An Ever-Ready razor of the later pattern is British production and has to be read against the British line, and the two endings of the American brand are both recorded here rather than averaged into one date.
The Kampfe Star layer, and what its numbers are
Behind the American Safety Razor name sits Kampfe Bros Star, whose razors carry numbers in the form HR followed by a letter and digit. Those are not serial numbers and not date codes: they are catalogue numbers of specimens in the reference study, and the year printed in the row is the year that model was produced. Reading HR-4A as a serial number is the mistake this layer exists to prevent. The disambiguating markers on a Star are its stamps and its medals — Paris 1900 and the Pan American medals among them.
What you get, and what to do next
A Gem or an Ever-Ready gives you a model, a window and, where the patent wording differs, a side of the line. That is a real identification and it is more than most people manage. What it will not give you is a build year, because nothing on the razor encodes one.
Read the model and typology page for how this layer sits beside the Gillette and Schick methods, and the packaging article for why the case and the blade magazine are part of the answer here.