gillette safety razor
Blades at the time were actually made of forged steel and looked like a “section” of a straight razor blade. They were re-sharpened when they became dull and went back into the rotation with several others. Blades you can get at just about any drug store. The shaving cream is a little different….
I use to shave with a safety razor.One blade (now there is 5,6,7 blades per razor).When it got dull you change it, and put the dull balde into a special slot in the packaging,and some medicine cabinets even had a slot to dispose of the dull razor blades.
The Gillette story
King Camp Gillette was the inventor and manufacturer of the safety razor with disposable blades. After persistent efforts to invent something that everyone would use, by 1895 produced a crude version of a disposable razor blade. King Gillette?s brainstorm was to design a razor that held a disposable steel blade. He would sell the masses
After Gillette’s initial success, other manufacturers soon followed suit with their own designs, and an entire industry was born.
Gillette obtained a trademark registration for his portrait and signature on the packaging and production began in 1903. Thanks in part to Gillette’s low prices, automated manufacturing techniques, effective marketing and advertising, by 1908 the corporation had established manufacturing facilities in the United States, Canada, England, France and Germany and by 1915 razor sales reached 450,000 units and blade sales exceeded 70 million units.
King Gillette served as the company’s global good-will ambassador, traveling around the world in his ostensible retirement. When he wasn’t on the go, he tried to help his only son, Kingie, to follow in his footsteps and be an inventor, but it never happen.
He would sell the razor as a fixture and the blades as refill products, over and over to the same customers. King Gillette, whose image was on the wrapper of every blade his firm sold, may have been the best-known man in the world. Yet, he died in 1932 nearly bankrupt from poor investments and taxes.
Lately, the Gillette man has embraced another masculine ideal: trading up. The Gillette company has mastered the art of releasing a new, more innovative razor every few years, whether humanity needs it or not. Later the name was changed to the Chronicle, and still later to the Evergreen City Times.