Gillette, King C.

Widely praised or blamed as the entrepreneur who inaugurated throwaway products, as a utopian socialist reformer, King Camp Gillette (1855–1932) spent his life excoriating capitalism's inequalities and the inefficiencies of competition. Published a decade before the patent for disposable razor blades, Gillette's 1894 book The Human Drift dreamed up a vast hydropowered megalopolis that would consolidate U.S. urban populations and industrial production. His experiences running the Gillette Safety Razor Company informed later monographs advocating the establishment of a single, publicly owned corporation that would produce and distribute the entirety of humanity's material needs, putting an end to war and social inequality. Gillette's business practices and socialist advocacy were both marked by a materialist pragmatism riveted on exploiting possibilities of efficiency and waste inherent in commodity chains and industrial systems.

Gillette was born in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, and raised in Chicago, Illinois. His father worked as a patent agent after the fire of 1871 destroyed his hardware store, and young Gillette became a traveling salesman. His mother published a celebrated cookbook that perhaps inspired Gillette's lifelong preoccupation with writing. Despite financial success from his razor empire, Gillette was nearly bankrupt at the time of his death in the midst of the Great Depression.