The Razor King
When he was well into his thirties, King Camp Gillette received some advice from a friend. Gillette was a bottle-cap salesman and his friend was the company’s president, William Painter, who had invented the cork-lined bottle cap.
“King,” he said, “you are always thinking and inventing something. Why don’t you try to think of something like the Crown Cork, which, when once used, is thrown away, and the customer keeps coming back for more—and with every additional customer you get, you are building a foundation of profit.”
Gillette became obsessed with the 1 idea. On his long sales trips he went through lists of “nearly every material need,” as he later recalled, looking for something disposable to invent. One morning, as he began to shave in his home in Brookline, Massachusetts, he found his blade dull. “As I stood there with the razor in my hand, my eyes resting on it as lightly as a bird settling down on its nest—the Gillette razor was born. I saw it all in a moment, and in that same moment many unvoiced questions were asked and answered more with the rapidity of a dream than by the slow process of reasoning. … I stood there before that mirror in a trance of joy at what I saw.” What he saw was to become one of the most successful inventions of all time—the Gillette safety razor.
A year earlier he had been inspired by a completely different epiphany, a vision of a Utopia, “a perfect civilization,” all the world’s industries and governments working harmoniously together in one vast, efficient machine. After these two visions, Gillette later wrote to his friend the author Upton Sinclair, “my life seemed to separate into two distinct entities, one devoted to earning a living and the other to the problem of how to overcome the difficulties of the industrial world, for out of its confusion there seem to flow all the troubles of humanity.”
As a rule Gillette kept his two pursuits separate. The man on the razor-blade package came to be one of the most widely recognizable faces in the world; the Utopian wanted to eliminate advertising. The Razor King had mansions and limousines; the Utopian wanted to ban all corporate profits. One of his visions would change the world; the other, no matter how hard he tried, never changed a thing. Yet, characteristically, he jumped wholeheartedly into the pursuit of both, with a zeal that carried him past many difficulties and sustained him for the rest of his life.
On the day in 1895 when he had his shaving reverie, he set off to a hardware store to buy parts for a model, steel ribbon (used in clock springs), brass, a hand vise, and some files. He told his wife, “I have got it; our fortune is made.”
That was the way Gillette liked to tell the story, but in truth it would take him six years of discouraging work before the first blade was ever made, eight years before he started selling it, and eleven years before he received any dividends. “Fool that I was, I knew little about razors and practically nothing about steel,” Gillette recalled years later.
Yet Gillette was familiar with the obstacles that faced an inventor. King Camp Gillette was born in 1855 in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, into a family that was always industriously tinkering with something. His father was in the hardware business in Chicago and held a few patents, and his mother even experimented at the dinner table. For years she tried out new recipes, such as rattlesnake meat, which were put to a family vote. She included the winners in a book she co-wrote, The White House Cook Book , one of the best-selling cookbooks of its era, which sold three million copies in five languages.
In the nineteenth century razors were expensive items that lasted a lifetime. The thick blades had to be ritualistically stropped and honed almost daily. Shaving was a tricky business that most men left to a barber. Gillette was proposing something new: a blade made from a thin piece of metal that would be thrown away and replaced when it got dull.
Everyone told Gillette his design was unworkable. He was turned down by a metallurgist at MIT who said that you couldn’t put a sharp edge on inexpensive sheet metal. Undaunted, Gillette made drawings of his razor and a small wooden model, and he talked of little else. He tried “every machine shop and cutler in Boston and some in New York and Newark,” but the resulting blades always failed. He even tried tempering the steel himself. Eventually he reached a dead end. Five years of work, and all he had to show for it was a couple of clunky prototypes, with no working blade. “If I had been technically trained, I would have quit or probably never would have begun,” he said later.
In the meantime Gillette refined his ideas about social efficiency. He had been working his territory for the bottle-cap company when the idea for a Utopia came to him. On a rainy day in June 1894, he sat by his hotel window in Scranton, Pennsylvania, looking out on a traffic jam—a terrific knot of horses, wagons, and streetcars all stopped by a broken-down grocery wagon. Then he had what he was to refer to as THE THOUGHT .
In his mind he followed the route the wagon had taken to break down in Scranton. Goods had come from the world over to be mired in a muddy street. “I traced the flour from the mills to the farmer, the salt to the earth, the sugar to the plantation, the spices across the seas to China and Japan.” Then he saw it clearly: All the goods in that truck were really the product of “one vast operative mechanism.” All the world’s industries and governments were part of a single machine.
Gillette wanted to make the machine run efficiently by bringing all production under the control of one huge corporation. The people themselves would be the shareholders. The profits, equitably distributed, would eliminate “all struggle for gain” and nine-tenths of all crime. “Selfishness would be unknown, and war would be a barbarism of the past.” Gillette developed his concept into a Utopia and published The Human Drift in 1894.
The book was Gillette’s entry in an increasingly crowded field. Ever since 1516, when Sir Thomas More had given the concept of an ideal society its name with his book Utopia , writers had been spinning their own fanciful versions of earthly perfection. As the Industrial Revolution picked up its pace, people began to see how greatly technology could improve their lives. At the same time, however, it was apparent that new mines and factories and industries had also created severe problems. As the Gilded Age, with its extremes of wealth and poverty and corruption, came to a close, many people were shaken by the inequalities modern industry had created. They sought ways to make available to everyone the benefits of technology. Edward Bellamy’s 1888 Looking Backward popularized the Utopian genre, and soon the public was flooded with books containing visions of happy, productive, cooperative, egalitarian societies—some 160 by the turn of the century.
Gillette’s particular Utopia would abolish competition, advertising, superfluous middlemen, and eventually money itself. “If I believed in a devil, I should be convinced that competition for wealth was his most ingenious invention for filling hell,” Gillette wrote. His world would be so efficient that, as he wrote in a later work, “an individual under the corporate system could produce enough in five years to maintain him for a lifetime of seventy years.” Gillette’s Utopia was a business deal. Other eras had seen dreams of Utopia as a city of God or as a good society led by philosopher-kings, but here God was the production line and the philosopher-king was the manager.
The Human Drift is a long, chaotic book with detailed illustrations of Gillette’s new city, a lengthy poem in which Satan debates “reason,” and a prospectus of the “United Company” that begins “We, the people. …” He used every salesman’s trick he knew, including drawing his audience in with questions: “What would you do?” and “Can you—yes, you who are now reading this—can you deny the possibility…?” There is a coupon to clip to buy stock in the proposed United Company and a form with which to join the United People’s Party.
In the future, as Gillette saw it, 60 million Americans would be housed in one huge city powered by the Niagara River, a city as wonderful as a “perpetual world’s fair.” The residents of Metropolis would live in a grid of 24,000 apartment buildings, more than 100 million rooms in all, each standardized, to simplify rug cutting. The apartment buildings, grouped around large domed courtyards, resembled 25-story-tall beehives.
Metropolis would stand on a platform with three levels. The middle one was to be for transportation; it would also be used to bring meals to the vast dining halls. The upper level was to be illuminated by 36,000 flower conservatories, each one roofed with colored glass: “Here would be found a panorama of beauty that would throw into shadow the fables of wonderful palaces and cities told of in the ‘Arabian Nights.’” Each building “would stand a perfect work of art,” covered inside and out in rainbow-hued glazed ceramic tile.
“Can you imagine the endless beauty of a conception like this,” Gillette asked, “a city with its thirty-six thousand buildings each a perfectly distinct and complete design, with a continuous and perfectly finished facade from every point of view, each building and avenue surrounded and bordered by an ever-changing beauty in flowers and foliage?” He propounded some further ideas in 1897 with a pamphlet called The Ballot Box , but the public did not respond with the enthusiasm he had hoped for, and he put aside his literary pursuits to concentrate on developing the razor blade.
After years of effort, which he pursued as energetically as he propounded his social ideas, Gillette at last found someone who could design a machine to make the blades: William Emery Nickerson, an inventor who was quick to solve mechanical problems. Within twenty-four hours after a serious elevator accident in Boston, Nickerson had invented a safety attachment. He went on making patented elevator improvements for years. Nickerson had solved production quandaries before, once producing light bulbs by a method that Thomas Edison himself had pronounced impossible. He improved Gillette’s razor design, making the blade wider and the handle heavier, modifications that allowed accurate adjustments to the blade.
Nickerson also worked for months to make machines that would harden steel and sharpen the blades. “The problem,” he said, “is entirely different from that involved in the tempering and grinding of ordinary razors and other keen tools, not only on account of the thinness of the blades, but also on account of the cheapness with which it must be done.”
For all the new machines that would automatically hone and grind Nickerson made no sketches, recalled Anne Bezanson, who worked for the youns razor company. “Once he conceived the mechanism mentally, he dictated directly to a draftsman, giving dimensions of parts, materials out of which each was to be made, only stopping at times to give detailed precautions about the construction of parts on which there would be strain or wear. Once the machine was built, he often expressed surprise if asked to go to the experimental room to see whether it would work.”
The process for hardening the steel held Nickerson up for several months; the thin metal buckled as it cooled. The solution came to him as he was rocking on his porch one night: The blades could be made to cool more uniformly by surrounding them with layers of a different metal that had slower cooling properties.
Nickerson wanted recognition for his work. Gillette had “admirably accomplished” the invention of the razor, Nickerson said, but “its practical development [was] carried forward by others, for the two things are quite separate and each required a type of mind and a training quite distinct.”
Nickerson didn’t think the new company should be called the Gillette Safety Razor Company. Realizing that his own name would not work (“Nickerson” would be a singularly poor label for razors), he proposed the American Safety Razor Company. The company’s organizers agreed, but a year later Gillette maneuvered to get his own name on the company.
Nevertheless, Gillette appreciated Nickerson’s inventive genius and wrote in 1916: “I don’t think there is any man that I have ever come across in my life that has his wonderful mechanical ability to do thines. Without Mr. Nickerson our business would not be anywhere today.”
When the company was chartered, in Maine in 1901, its president was still on the road selling bottle caps. There was no factory and no product. Nickerson was still trying to refine the machinery. After a close call with bankruptcy, the company produced its first razors in October 1903. Sales for the inaugural year: 51 razors and 168 blades. At the beginning of 1904 Gillette was sent to London to establish Crown Cork’s operations there. With his razor company not yet showing a profit, he had to accept the assignment.
The first blades were more expensive to make than had been expected: five cents apiece in labor alone. Nickerson soon devised a bench grinder to cut costs, an invention the board of directors credited with saving the company, but not before it suffered through such a financial squeeze that Gillette had to return suddenly from London after seven months to take control of operations. In 1904 the company sold 91,000 razors and more than two million blades. It soon moved to a six-story factory—“The largest Factory in the World devoted to the exclusive manufacture of razors,” said the company’s letterhead. (The letterhead also included the company’s cable address: NOSTROP .)
From the start Gillette advertised boldly, spending twenty-five cents a razor, then fifty cents, for a total of more than a million dollars in 1906. His social ideas made him oppose competition on principle, and when the competition involved him, he was doubly offended. He compared heavy advertising to chasing his competitors from the field with a Catling gun. (Patent-infringement suits were also effective.) His advertisements made early use of athletes, such as John McGraw, manager of the New York Giants, who said of the razor in one ad: “It makes shaving all to the merry.”
At the turn of the century barbershops were, in Gillette’s words, “as thick as saloons,” and they served much the same function as workingmen’s social clubs. Men would stop in daily to get shaved, discuss world events, and catch up on gossip. Regular customers had their own shaving mugs, with their names applied in gold leaf and their occupations depicted with hand-painted scenes. Barbershops developed a hierarchy, with longtime regulars establishing rights to sit in their favorite chairs or to get served ahead of newcomers.
A visit to the barber thus involved much more than simply getting shaved, but Gillette, ever the time-is-money businessman, saw all the small-town socializing as a huge squandering of resources. “If the time, money, energy, and brain-power which are wasted in the barber shops of America were applied in direct effort, the Panama canal would be dug in four hours,” the company advertised in 1906. Later, using an elaborate formula, Gillette figured that the monetary value of the time men saved each year using his razor was equal to the capital of U.S. Steel. A Gillette shave was also more manly, a 1910 ad implied. Shaving at home was more “wholesome” than the “ladylike massage-finish of the tonsorial artist” and the “reek of violet water.”
After getting men to try his blades in the first place, Gillette had to teach them to throw the used ones away. At first the company was caught in the contradiction of promoting the durability of a throwaway product. In 1905 it advertised the testimonial of a Sioux City, Iowa, bank auditor who shaved with one blade sixty-two times and was still at it. People wrote to the company boasting of using the same blade for years; one man claimed that he had shaved for eight years, five times a week, with one blade. To Gillette’s consternation, many customers had their blades resharpened at hardware stores or bought gadgets to do it themselves. In fact, initially the Gillette company was itself in the resharpening business: It offered six new blades in exchange for twelve used ones, which it would put new edges on and resell. This practice was abandoned in 1906.
As the razor caught on, the company quietly dropped its claims for the longevity of the blades (it had advertised twenty to forty shaves apiece). A 1927 survey showed that on average each blade was used eight and a half times.
Used razor blades were a new kind of waste. People didn’t know how to throw them out. In many areas they couldn’t go into the trash because trash was fed to hogs. Sinclair Lewis had George F. Babbitt tossing them up on top of the cabinet, hoping one day to clean it up. Gillette co-wrote a magazine article suggesting ways to dispose of blades, and the New York Telegram ran a survey in 1927: What do you do with your old razor blades? H. L. Mencken answered that he “put them in the collection plate.” Eventually it became standard to put a slot in medicine chests through which blades could be harmlessly dropped into the wall.
In all the advertising, the Gillette razor was the biggest, the best, the most important—“one of the greatest mechanical inventions of the 20th Century.” One 1906 ad showed the father of his country holding a safety razor: “George Washington Gave an Era of Liberty to the Colonies. The Gillette’ gives an Era of Personal Liberty to all Men.” The company reached farther back in history in a 1913 brochure: “The message of Solon to the Greeks of old was ‘Man Know Thyself.’ The message of Gillette to all the world is ‘Man Shave Thyself.’”
The world heard that message. During World War I a half-million doughboys found the razor in their government-issued kits. Benito Mussolini told a reporter in 1926 that his beard was so strong that he needed a new blade for each shave. “I am anti-whiskers. Fascism is anti-whiskers,” Mussolini said. So, apparently, was civil disobedience. In 1929 the Bombay Times reported that visitors had found Mahatma Gandhi shaving. The paper speculated: “Are we to take it that Mr. Gandhi’s sweet, unruffled temper is a tribute to the superlative excellence of the Gillette Safety Razor?”
Gillette was universally acclaimed. Shaving led to increasing life expectancy, said the chairman of the board of the National Life Insurance Company: “By cutting off his whiskers a man unconsciously adopted a more youthful attitude; he felt younger, he kept younger, he dressed younger.” And Collier’s magazine claimed, “Shaving as it is practiced in America today marks a step forward in civilization.”
By the 1920s King Camp Gillette was world-famous. His face had been printed on an estimated 96 billion wrappers. He was so famous that many thought he was a fictitious character made up by the company, and his presence at a company banquet or in a foreign office often startled. On a world tour in 1922 the Razor King was cheered by villagers in the Sahara who surrounded his camel, making a pantomime of shaving motions. Gillette gave them packets of blades, as he did everyone he met.
As he built his company and oversaw its growth, Gillette remained possessed by the idea of efficiency. For him it was the yardstick of perfection, the measure of the ideal civilization. His name was linked with the razor, but Gillette always saw himself as the “Inventor of the System of World Corporation.”
As early as 1910 Gillette was wealthy enough to leave a considerable part of his business duties to others. The idea of men shaving themselves had caught on quickly, and the Gillette Safety Razor Company was prosperous and well established. After rancorous litigation with John Joyce, who had put up the money to get the company going in 1903, Gillette had settled the dispute by selling most of his stock. His day-to-day superintendence was no longer needed, and he was free to spend the rest of his life on what he saw as greater concerns. He retired to the Los Angeles area to chase his orderly Utopia (though he did occasionally return to business, designing a new type of razor as late as 1929 and directing the buyout of a competitor the following year).
After a decade’s hiatus Gillette had returned to the field of political philosophy in 1906 with an article in the National Magazine called “World Corporation (Unlimited).” The next year saw publication of the 783-page Gillette’s Social Redemption (written by an associate, Melvin L. Severy), which a biographer of Gillette calls “one of the most tedious philosophical tomes ever composed in the English language.” Severy followed up in 1908 with Gillette’s Industrial Solution , comparatively breezy at only 598 pages. Neither book found favor with the critics.
Then in 1910 Gillette published World Corporation , his proposal for a trust that would buy up land and production facilities. By putting Gillette’s ideas into practice, the trust would return huge profits, eventually displacing all other business entities, at which point the whole world would share in the rewards. “Individual man will have his life and pass into the great beyond,” Gillette wrote, “but this great Corporate Mind will live through the ages, always absorbing and perfecting, for the utilization and benefit of all inhabitants of the earth.”
Reform was in the air in early-twentieth-century America, and Walter Lippmann assessed the many proposals and movements of the era in Drift and Mastery (1914). “You find engineers who don’t see why you can’t build society on the analogy of a steam engine,” Lippmann wrote, “you find lawyers … who see in the courts an intimation of heaven; sanitation experts who wish to treat the whole world as one vast sanitarium, lovers who wish to treat it as one vast happy family; education enthusiasts who wish to treat it as one vast nursery. No one who undertook to be the Balzac of reform by writing its Human Comedy could afford to miss the way in which the reformer in each profession tends to make his specialty an analogy for the whole of life.”
Gillette registered the World Corporation in the Arizona Territory and offered its presidency to Theodore Roosevelt, recently retired as President of the United States, for a million dollars for a four-year term. (Gillette believed he could find twenty volunteers to chip in $50,000 apiece.) “I make this offer,” Gillette said, “feeling that the position would carry with it greater honor than to be President, King, or Emperor of any nation in the world.” Roosevelt declined.
After the World Corporation quietly folded a few years later, Gillette decided to approach a fellow Californian, Upton Sinclair. Sinclair had established a reputation as a proponent of social reform with The Jungle (1906)—an exposé of the meat-packing industry—and various other muckraking projects. Gillette arrived, unannounced, at Sinclair’s office one day in 1918 and handed his calling card, with a hundred-dollar bill attached, to his secretary.
As Sinclair sat listening to Gillette, he “discovered that the joy of his life was to get someone to listen while in his gentle pleading voice he told about his two-tome Utopia.” (Gillette’s persistent earnestness eventually made him something of a pest to Sinclair.) W. Sinclair also discovered that despite his great wealth, Gillette “could not bear the thought of others’ suffering.” The two men came at the problems of society from opposite directions— Sinclair stressed the dangers of big business while Gillette sought to spread its benefits—but in the end they discovered considerable common ground.
Sinclair managed to help shape the most concise statement of Gillette’s beliefs, The People’s Corporation , which was published in 1924. Gillette backed the book with $25,000 of his own for advertising, and it was his most widely reviewed effort. But most of the notices were not favorable. “It is difficult to take Mr. Gillette’s book seriously,” said The New York Times , puzzled that a man who owned a string of mansions and had two chauffeurs and three Fierce-Arrow limousines could say that we “waste our lives in accumulating wealth.”
“Another Utopia,” said Outlook magazine, “and to the mind of his reviewer the most hideous to date; which is saying much.” Stuart Chase in The Nation was the most sympathetic: “His sincerity is compelling and deep; his analysis of the industrial jungle is shrewd and imaginative, but his solution is quite untouched by the realities which guard the road to Utopia.” The Dictionary of American Biography succinctly frames the problem with all of Gillette’s social schemes (and those of many others) by saying that he “assumed an omniscience in planning and a uniformity of individual desires which Americans, at least, do not yet possess.”
Sinclair stood by his friend, “the millionaire socialist,” promoted his ideas, and tried to interest other business leaders in them. In the 1920s he managed to set up a meeting between Gillette and Henry Ford.
The two men sat down opposite each other in easy chairs in front of a fireplace, the tall, thin “Flivver King,” as Sinclair called Ford, and the stout Razor King (“a cartoonist’s idea of a plutocrat,” said Sinclair). For two hours they argued the merits of competition, which Ford applauded and Gillette called anarchy. Sinclair said “it was like watching two billiard balls—they hit and then flew apart, and neither made the slightest impression upon the other.”
Sinclair tried another meeting at his house, with guests including a bank president, a real estate magnate, and the publisher of a newspaper chain. With “gentleness and patience” Gillette presented his ideas, but the men soon lost their tempers, said Sinclair, and “tore into the project with tooth and claws and before they got through they had perspiration standing out on the forehead of the man who was turning traitor to his class. …” “They are wolves!” Gillette said afterward.
Gillette was ill in his last years, but his optimism never failed him. He grew and marketed fruit; he invested in companies making pens and automobile parts; and he backed a venture to extract oil from shale. Like many in the 1920s, he invested heavily in California real estate, riding the boom until he was two million dollars in debt. Just two weeks before the October 1929 crash he had tried to sell his Gillette stock to pay his loans, but the directors dissuaded him: How would it look for the company if the man on the wrapper sold out? When the crash came, he was seventy-four and ill. He had to sell nearly everything he owned.
But still he believed in THE THOUGHT . “I have given 40 years of study to this subject—and have been unable to find any flaws in the fundamental plan,” he wrote to Sinclair in 1930, two years before his death. He despaired only that he was running out of time. He was sure that he had a solution as wonderful as his razor, “the biggest little thing” ever patented.
King Camp Gillette used the safety razor as an example of how efficiency could make the world a better place. But society was not the razor writ large. Reforming society was not merely a matter of good design and aggressive marketing. Gillette failed to appreciate that the complex passions and desires that make a society would inevitably thwart his vision of the world as one vast interlocking machine, humming along harmoniously.
