Yes, I had a great barber in college in a nearby town. He gave a great cut and the social experience in his shop on a Saturday made it especially worth going there.
Post graduation I dreaded finding a replacement barber and considerred the possibility of cutting my own hair. I quickly found I could not possibly do it with scissors and a mirror. I was more likely to proverbially poke my eye out with those things in the attempt.
I had made the observation about feathering, that it involves pulling the hair out to a consistent distance from the head and cutting there. I got an electric hair clippler and, using cardboard, made a vacuum-cleaner attachment that held the vac hose on the top side of the clipper. It was also formed into a chute that would draw the hair over the clipper and, when cut, into the vacuum. The chute extended far enough to enforce a minimum cut length. To cut longer I add fingers combing through my hair between scalp and chute.
No one else has cut my hair since. No muss no fuss, takes me about ten minutes when I get around to it. I’m on the third rendition of cardboard chute, the original two having broken down from wear and tear. The current model adds a sleeve of thick old yoga mat around the vacuum hose end to “seal” between the end of the hose and the chute and the top of the razor. The sleeved hose stradles the top side of the clipper, the chute goes over that and channels forward and down beyond the cutting teeth. there is about a ¾” gap between the cutting teeth and the chute and hair is pulled into that. A velcro strap goes around the whole assembly to hold it together while in use.
It is a very effective technique, but it’s so peculiar I didn’t tell anyone but closest friends about the method for some time. Years went by and one day a friend excitedly says to me, “I saw your thing on TV!” (I’m thinking,“My ’thing’?”) “You know, your haircutting thing!” he continued. It was then I learned of Robocut.
As far as I know, from casual investigation, my invention predates by a few years the RoboCut and the Flobee, to which mine is even more similar. There are earlier industrial-strength sheep-shearing systems that operate the same way – the vacuum collects the wool – but I saw no evidence that those were intended or adapted to human hair.