. . . was born on this date in 1855.
At the age of 17, Gillette became a traveling salesman, who made improvement to his wares as well as selling them. By 1890, he had earned four patents. More importantly, he had learned from the President of his company that disposable items made for big sales.
On the road, Gillette used to shave every morning with a Star Safety Razor: that is, a heavy, wedge-shaped blade fitted perpendicularly into its handle. It would have been downright dangerous, in the lavatory of a rumbling train, for Gillette to shave with the type of straight razor used by most men at the time. However, the safety razor did share a major shortcoming with standard razors: the blade had to be sharpened frequently on a leather strop; and even so, the blade eventually became too worn to sharpen.
One morning in 1895, Gillette, now living in Boston, had a revelation: if he could put a sharp edge on a small square of sheet steel, he could market a safety razor blade that could be thrown away when it grew dull, and readily replaced. Gillette visited metallurgists at MIT, who assured him his idea was impossible. It took Gillette six years to find an engineer, William Emery Nickerson (an MIT-trained inventor), who could produce the blade Gillette wanted.
In 1901, Gillette and Nickerson formed the American Safety Razor Company (soon thereafter renamed for Gillette himself). For the first time, razor blades would be sold in multiple packages, with the razor handle a one-time purchase. Production began in 1903; Gillette won a patent for his product the next year.
Competition was fierce from the start, for two reasons. First, virtually half the world’s population was a potential customer; second, once the basic idea was made public, modifications multiplied at an incredible rate. For example, Gillette introduced his double-edged blade, of the still familiar type, in 1904; soon, so did many other companies. In a series of patent battles, Gillette Co. often resolved the controversy by buying the competitor. Over the years, he became a kind of international celebrity, since his portrait was featured on the wrappers of the tens of billions of Gillette blades sold all over the world.
Excerpted from Inventor of the Week: Archive — MIT
Small world. I recognized this name because right after Thanksgiving a guy who had been doing some plumbing work for the beauty shop next door came into our bookshop. His last name is also Gillette, and he is distantly related to him. He was looking for a book he had heard of but never seen in real life, a novel called The Human Drift. Wikipedia says: “Gillette was also a Utopian Socialist. He published a book titled The Human Drift (1894), which advocated that all industry should be taken over by a single corporation owned by the public, and that everyone in the US should live in a giant city called Metropolis powered by Niagara Falls.”
When I looked before we didn’t find anything but rather expensive POD reprints. Just now when I went to get some details so I could make this comment, I found a reasonably priced 1st ed of a related work, World Corporation. I think my plumber friend will be very happy!