Long before King Camp Gillette met bottle cap titan William Painter, inventing was in his blood.
He came from a family of creative dynamos. Mother Fanny Lemira Gillette authored and published the famous White House Cookbook in 1887, which sold millions of copies and remains in print today. Father George Wolcott Gillette was a writer, small newspaper editor, consummate tinkerer, and patent agent in Chicago. He manufactured “japanned tinware” and promoted a shingle-making machine. In 1873, the elder Gillette copatented a tool for drilling openings into the staves or heads of barrels to retrieve their liquid contents. King’s brothers, George H. and Mott, also inherited the inventing bug.
Like William Painter, the Gillette boys worked with their hands from an early age. “My impulse to think and invent was a natural one,” Gillette wrote in his memoirs. His parents inculcated self-sufficiency and persistence in all of their children. After the devastating Chicago fire of 1871, George W. and Fanny moved with their younger children to New York to start anew. King remained in the Windy City to take work in the hardware business. He found a calling in sales, but continued to tinker on the side with his brothers on various improvements to barrels. While George W. never hit it big commercially with his tools, he urged King to keep at it: “Just invent something that the people need, and you’ll make yourself wealthy for life. Keep looking. You’ll hit upon something that a lot of people want.”
In his twenties and thirties, Gillette wandered—both physically and intellectually. He rode the rails peddling tools. He sailed to London to sell soap. He patented a few gadgets, he confessed, that “made money for others, but seldom for myself.” Next, he published a bizarre manifesto called “The Human Drift” touting utopian socialism. The tome came illustrated with a creepy drawing of giant communal towers for workers who would live in his idealized metropolis, to be built at Niagara Falls. This was apparently in tribute to George Westinghouse and Nikola Tesla’s alternating-current power plant, under construction at the time. Fortunately for Gillette, not to mention the fate of hairy men everywhere, the oddball book flopped. Marriage and a child on the way kept the would-be philosopher grounded. His career as a traveling salesman put food on the table. He was good at it and his reputation grew.
In 1891, William Painter invited King Gillette to join the Baltimore Bottle Seal Company and soon after, Crown Cork & Seal, as a traveling sales rep in New York and New England. “It was at [Painter’s] solicitation that I joined the company,” Gillette recalled fondly. Given their mutual passion for invention, a deep friendship was inevitable. Painter welcomed Gillette into his home for “intimate talks on inventions.” He freely dispensed business advice to Gillette as he had done with countless other aspiring tinkerpreneurs pursuing the American Dream. Gillette soaked up Painter’s wisdom and fully understood the business significance of his bottle cap innovations. He appreciated the miracle of the mundane.
“Mr. Painter was a very interesting talker when interested in his subject and thoroughly conversant with all the details and possibilities of his own inventions,” Gillette reflected, “which though little in themselves seemed without boundary to their possibilities when one realizes their unlimited fields of applications.”
As Gillette told it in his own company’s history, Painter steered him toward the practical and the disposable. The razor-sharp businessman gave Gillette the consumer-driven focus he had been lacking. “[Y]ou are always thinking and inventing something,” Painter told Gillette. But he had never sustained a viable business. Painter advised Gillette: “Why don’t you try to think of something like a crown cork, which, 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 for profit?”
Those words, Gillette said, “stuck to me like a burr.” When Gillette doubted that he could come up with anything beyond the “corks, pins, and needles” that had already been conceived, Painter persisted: “You don’t know. It is not probable that you ever will find anything that is like the Crown Cork, but it won’t do any harm to think about it.”
Gillette’s famed epiphany that led to the creation of the ubiquitous safety razor struck in 1895 as he stood in front of his bathroom mirror: “[W]hen I started to shave, I found my razor dull, and it was not only dull, it was beyond the point of stropping and it needed honing, for which it must be taken to a barber or a cutler.”
At age forty, his long-sought “Aha!” moment had arrived.
“As I stood there with the razor in my hand,” Gillette recalled, “my eyes resting on it lightly as a bird settling down on its nest—the Gillette razor was born.” He “knew practically nothing about steel.” His idea “was looked upon as a joke by all my friends.” Experts told him that putting an edge on sheet steel for shaving couldn’t be done. His own father and brothers, preoccupied with their own new endeavor manufacturing horse clippers, blew him off.
But as William Painter had counseled family, friends, and colleagues: “The only way to do a thing is to do it.” Grappling with the mental weight of his own business and the physical ravages of overwork, Painter was not in a position to become invested or involved in Gillette’s enterprise. But in addition to providing inspiration and intellectual fuel to Gillette, he supplied as much moral support as he could. After viewing a model razor Gillette showed him, Painter urged: “[I]t looks like a real invention with great possibilities. I am sorry I cannot join you in its development, but my health will not permit it. But whatever you do, don’t let it get away from you.”
Gillette continued to work for Crown Cork & Seal while he conducted experiments, sought financial support, and solicited technical help in perfecting his blades. He ignored the mockers and detractors. During his crown-cap business trips, he met clients who referred him to MIT-trained chemist and mechanical genius William Nickerson.
Nickerson had more than one hundred patents to his name. “He is an inventor by nature,” a scientific journal wrote, and “his genius consistently running in the direction of producing something new and better in the industrial arts.” Unfortunately, he had suffered several business setbacks in leather tanning, gold-mining, elevator safety device manufacturing, lightbulb manufacturing, and food-weighing machinery. At first, he turned Gillette down. But innate stubbornness served them both well. “I was a dreamer who believed in the ‘gold at the foot of the rainbow’ promise, and continued in the path where wise ones fear to tread, and that is the reason, the only reason, why there is a Gillette razor today,” Gillette reflected.
Once Nickerson became convinced the idea was viable, he toiled obsessively on the hardening and sharpening machines that would turn ribbon-thin steel into disposable blades. In September 1901, the engineer reported to company representatives that after giving the idea much thought, “I am confident that I have grasped the situation and can guarantee, as far as such a thing can be guaranteed, a successful outcome.” The first blades he produced were “so crooked and crumpled as to be wholly useless.” While he perfected the blade-making process, his machinists worked on the blade holder and handle. Nickerson’s employees went for weeks without pay as they figured out how to automate the machinery for putting edges on the hardened blades.
Nickerson also grappled with how to prevent the blades from buckling under the heat-intensive steel-making process. The Carrier Corporation helped solve a related, nettlesome manufacturing problem: rusting. The company provided a refrigeration system to remove moisture from compressed air used in its pneumatic machinery.
Meanwhile, Gillette scrounged up investors and incorporated the safety razor company bearing his name. He and his representatives recruited twenty investors to pitch in $250 each for five hundred shares of the company per investor. Their lawyer ensured that the patent application would be an “airtight instrument against infringers.” Just as the business was coming together, Gillette was sent by his employer, his mentor William Painter’s Crown Cork & Seal, to work in London. He went reluctantly, but was able to parlay the stint into overseas outreach and market research for his safety razor.
In 1904, Gillette received his breakthrough patent. Five years later, thanks to an aggressive marketing and promotional campaign that put his face on every package, the once-struggling bottle cap salesman was a worldwide, household name. Nickerson continued to innovate, inventing an automatic blade-honing machine a decade later that dramatically improved the company’s manufacturing efficiency and productivity.
The next year, Gillette rolled out the first-ever razor designed and marketed specifically for women. It was called the “Milady Decolette Gillette.” Just as the Scott brothers of toilet paper fame had to tiptoe around issues of hygiene at the tail end of the Victorian era, Gillette salesmen also bowed to cultural norms of the time. “Do not use the term ‘shaving’ as applied to this operation,” managers instructed. “Smoothing” was the euphemism of choice. A 1915 newspaper advertisement proclaimed that the “sleeveless evening gown” had made “insistent demand for a smooth skin.” The fourteen-karat gold-plated razor came encased in a “velvet and satin-lined French ivory case” of “dainty size.” The famous Gillette Blue Blade—double-edged, rustproof, oxidized, and dipped in a signature blue lacquer—entered the market in 1932.
Sadly, Gillette didn’t live to see the Blue Blade reach the market. After a long battle with intestinal disease, he died in his sleep at a ranch he had built for himself and his family in Southern California in 1932. Though plagued by Depression-era financial troubles at the end of his life, his Fortune 500 company, which was acquired by Procter & Gamble in 2005, now employs nearly thirty thousand, with sales topping $10 billion.
Despite his strange dabbling in utopian literature, Gillette was in practice a fierce capitalist who eloquently embraced the intellectual property rights of inventors. In a memo to his patent lawyers on one of countless patent infringement cases they pursued in defense of Gillette’s work, he wrote:
It is often true that invention involves underlying principles, purposes and questions of utility which are lost sight on in mere technical descriptions. To say that the Gillette blade only differs from other razors or blades in degree does not in any way describe the invention involved, or the principles or purposes that are inherent within it. . . . It is manifestly true that no one—previous to the Gillette invention—had conceived the idea of producing a blade . . . that would be so cheap to manufacture that its cost to the consumer would permit of its being discarded when dull.
Gillette further pointed out that before he came along, untold numbers of men did not shave themselves because they lacked the mechanical skill and had no alternative but to go to the barber, which cost precious time and money.
[T]he question of invention does not alone rest upon the fact that hundreds of thousands are now able to shave themselves who could not before, and do so without involving the question of skill in keeping their razor in condition, but it rests on its use by millions of men who have discarded other old style razors because the Gillette has reduced the art of shaving to such a cheap and simple process.
Patent rights are as important for the inventors of Big Things, such as electricity or the airplane, as they are for the inventors of small things, such as bottle caps or razors.
The serendipitous introductions of Painter to Gillette and Gillette to Nickerson—all lifelong tinkerers who turned their dreams into practical realities—underscore the importance of expanding your creative orbit. You never know who might be of help unless you expose as many people as possible to your ideas, failures, and aspirations for success. Self-sufficiency never means self-containment.
Successful tinkerpreneurs surround themselves with passionate investors, talented engineers, legal eagles, tireless marketers, and gifted salespeople. These concentric circles of creativity not only help secure success, but also ensure its expansion.
