A small blade safe can hold hundreds of blades and it’s like 4"x3"x3". Makes sense they thought the inside of drywall 5’x3’x1’ would be fine. It can probably hold tens of thousands. Even with a new blade daily that’s decades. And when you tear down the wall you’re dealing with Sheetrock, nails and screws already. All that time would have dulled the incredibly thin blades.
This is all to say: it seems wild but was a decent idea.
I think this is the first real TIL for me in ages.
Congrats ☺️
Wall full of tetanus.
This was behind the medicine cabinet in my house.
I thought people use those plastic blade disposal container that has a slot on top that you throw away once it gets full nowadays.
It’s not built into the wall, but the base principle still hasn’t changed even after all these times.
If I had this in my home, I would draw a face around this “mouth”.
Not just hotels but houses too. There would be a slot inside the medicine cabinet for disposing razors into the wall. Dude who came up with the idea was probably like, “we’ll all be dead from nuclear bombs before any of these fill up or needs to be renovated”.
They predate nukes, bro.
Safety razors with disposable blades were introduced about 120 years ago, at one blade a day that’s a bit less than 45000 blades
Double edged blades dimensions are: 0.1mm x 42.7mm x 22mm for 98.21mm³
45 000 blades would take a volume of 4 419 450mm³ or about 270in³
A regular indoor wall is made of 2x4 and each stud is 14.5 inches apart (16 inches on center). A 2x4 is in truth 1.5" x 3.5" so each inch of height inside the wall is 3.5 x 14.5 x 1 which is 50.75in³
45 000 blades stacked perfectly would therefore use 270 / 50.75 = 5.32 inches of the wall’s height… So even if they didn’t stack perfectly, it’s pretty safe to assume that there’s enough space inside the wall for hundreds of years at one blade a day (especially since old houses usually used true 2x4 and had their studs at 24" on center)
Remodeling contractors hate this one trick…
How bad could it be? They’d all be piled up at the bottom of one stud cavity and you know they’re there. If you’re demoing the wall you’re gonna have gloves and a shop vac and a bigass broom and shovel anyway.
Still I got a little blade bank (about the size of those mini soda cans) on Amazon for $7 for my double-edge blades. Last year. And it still has plenty of room in it. Supposedly it holds 300 blades. That’s two blades a week for nearly 3 years. An absurd frequency…I replace my blade every week and I shave my head and they could totally go longer, they’re just so damn cheap.
I think these plastic boxes the blades come in often have a slot for used blades on the bottom. They take up so little space without the paper around them that an entire pack fits into a 1mm slot maybe.
Multiple homes I’ve lived in have had these slots in the medicine cabinets lol.
Did they anticipate people not living long enough to care? Or that some biome would form to use the blades as food?
Interesting decisions all around.
Prevents them from being mixes in with general garbage and people cutting themselves when handling such.
Yeah we had a 1920s house with a metal medicine cabinet above the sink. It had the razor blade slot and yeah they literally fell into the wall between the studs.
