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b. Jan. 5, 1855,
Fond du Lac, Wis., U.S.
d. July 9, 1932, Los Angeles, Calif.
American inventor and first manufacturer of the safety razor and blade.
Reared in Chicago, Gillette was forced by his family's loss of possessions
in the fire of 1871 to go to work, becoming a traveling salesman of hardware.
An employer noted his predilection for mechanical tinkering, which sometimes
resulted in commercially profitable inventions, and advised him to invent
"something that would be used and thrown away," so that the
customer would keep coming back. While honing a permanent, straight-edge
razor, Gillette had the idea of substituting a thin double-edged steel
blade placed between two plates and held in place by a handle. Though
the proposal was received with skepticism because the blades could not
be sharpened, the manufactured product was a success from the beginning.
The first sale, in 1903, consisted of a lot of 51 razors and 168 blades;
by the end of 1904, Gillette's company had produced 90,000 razors and
12,400,000 blades.
He then turned his intellectual energies to publicizing a view of utopian
socialism in a series of books and other writings. He found competition
wasteful and envisaged a planned society in which economic effort would
be rationally organized by engineers. In 1910 he vainly offered former
President Theodore Roosevelt
$1,000,000 to act as president of an experimental
"World Corporation" in the Arizona Territory. Gillette remained
president of his company until 1931 but retired from active management
in 1913.
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