Mason Pearson Bros Ltd.
Established 1885Engineer and inventor Mason Pearson began his career designing wool processing looms in Bradford. In the mid 1860s he came to work at the British Steam Brush Works, in the East End of London, and joined a partnership, later known as Raper Pearson and Gill, which was in the business of general small-brush making. At the time, the brushes were made by hand. Pearson incorporated the knowledge from his time in the wool processing industry to spark the invention of an automatic brush-boring machine to speed up the whole process of brush making.
In 1885 he invented the ‘pneumatic’ rubber-cushion hairbrush which grew out to become the company’s primary product. It took until 1905 to improve and hone his technique, much of which was still required to be done by hand. The product design used nowadays is similar to the original 1885 model with the improvements of the fully developed models of the 1920s. The family business is passed down through generations and is still run by the Mason-Pearson family in London today.
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