Following the disastrous Chicago fire, which destroyed much of his father's property as well, King worked with the hardware firm of Seeberger and Breakey. Two years later, he took a comparable job New York; as he later recalled of the time, "From the time I was twenty-one until the fall of 1904 I was a traveling man and sold goods throughout the United States and England, but traveling was not my only vocation for I took out many inventions, some of which had merit and made money for others, but seldom for myself, for I was unfortunately situated not having much time and little money with which to promote my inventions or place them on the market'" (Gilbert, p. 13). All of this traveling naturally resulted in Gillette's being forced to "shave on the run," and given the relatively primitive (and dangerous) nature of the straight razors in use at the time, it is little wonder that men were looking for something safer, and contributed to the development of Gillette's concept about a razor that would not endanger the shaver's life on a bad morning (Gilbert, 1972). Demand for a good razor was also something that he knew was practically universal. According to Gillette's corporate Web site, "In 1926, the year of the Company's 25th anniversary, King C. Gillette wrote of the Company's flagship product, the safety razor, 'There is no other article for individual use so universally known or widely distributed. In my travels, I have found it in the most northern town in Norway and in the heart of the Sahara Desert'" (Gillette at a Glance, 2005 p. 1).
Gillette was also encouraged by friends and supervisors along the way as well. For example, an employer quickly noticed Gillette's mechanical aptitude and on occasion, his gadgets had resulted in commercially profitable inventions; this employer suggested that Gillette should invent "something that would be used and thrown away," so that the customer would have to buy more. This was a timely suggestion since Gillette was already working on honing a permanent, straight-edge razor at the time. As a result, Gillette was inspired to substitute a thin double-edged steel blade placed between two plates and held in place by a T. handle. "Though the proposal was received with skepticism because the blades could not be sharpened," one biographer notes, "the manufactured product was a success from the beginning. According to Gilbert, "With a family history of tinkering and a life spent in travel from one hotel to another -- and in one barber shop after another -- King Gillette became interested in finding a quick and safe way to shave. Most of all, he wished to make a time-saving invention, one which would end the waste that he saw and deplored around him" (p. 14). At the time, Gillette recorded in his journal that, "If the time, money, energy, and brain-power which was wasted in the barber shops of America were applied in direct effort, the Panama Canal would be dug in four hours" (in Gilbert, p. 14). Gillette's idea took several years and some unsuccessful and discouraging efforts to perfect. Finally, with the help of William W. Nickerson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Gillette developed a useful blade and holder. "In 1903 his small Gillette Company of Boston began to produce 'safety razors' and blades. Almost immediately the company found an enormous market, and Gillette, overnight, became wealthy and extraordinarily successful" (Gilbert, p. 15). The first razor sale in 1903 consisted of a small lot of 51 razors and 168 blades; however, just over a year later, by the end of 1904, Gillette's company had produced 90,000 razors and 12,400,000 blades (King Camp Gillette, 2005).
Even corporate management guru Peter F....
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