Gillette, King Camp

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GILLETTE, KING CAMP

Before the beginning of the 1900s, when the only means of shaving a beard was the straight razor, shaving was a nuisance and even dangerous. That changed, however, in 1903, when the disposable razor made its debut. No one has done more to alter the face of men's fashions than King Camp Gillette (1855–1932), inventor of the disposable razor.

Gillette was born in Fon du Lac, Wisconsin, on January 5, 1855, and raised in Chicago, Illinois. His family lost everything in the Chicago Fire of 1871, and he was forced to go to work. For the next 20 years Gillette worked in a succession of jobs ranging from traveling salesman to hardware store employee. A turning point came in 1891, when Gillette's current employer, William Painter, the inventor of the crown bottle cap, encouraged him to begin working on a product that would be thrown away after its use, thereby keeping consumers returning for more. It took Gillette four years to come up with his invention.

Seeing the need for a better way to shave, Gillette took the straight razor and improved upon it. He created a razor that housed a double-edged, thin metallic blade between two metal plates, which were then attached to a T-shaped handle. A crude first version of the razor was ready by 1895, but early proposals for the product met with skepticism. Nevertheless, he pushed on with the manufacturing of the razor, founding the Gillette Safety Razor Company, later renamed the Gillette Company, in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1901. In 1903 the company's first sale consisted of only 51 razors and 168 blades, but the razor was an instant success. Gillette went on to produce 90,000 razors and 12,400,000 blades by the end of his second year in business. The disposable razor was such a sweeping success that sales quickly grew into the millions. Beards, once common on men, were soon on the decline as it became increasingly fashionable for men to be seen well shaven.

Even though he retired in 1913 and moved to Los Angeles, Gillette remained president of his company until 1931. Although he continued to function as director, he shifted his focus to writing books; in these pages, he publicized his views on utopian socialism. Gillette believed that competition was a waste of time and resources. Instead he proposed that society should be restructured to adopt a system in which engineers plan out and organize all economic efforts. His views were similar to those expressed by Edward Bellamy, who envisioned a system based on the sharing of domestic functions within huge residential units, the planned utilization of advanced technology, and the organization of labor into efficient production groups. Although such views were never widely popular, Gillette did live to see his once small business expand into an enormous and successful company.

Gillette died in Los Angeles on July 9, 1932.

See also: Chicago Fire of 1871, Gillette Company, Utopian Communities