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# This razor needs sharpening every morning and I don't know how
- URL: https://www.thefrictionlog.com/05900/
- Published: 2026-10-08T13:31:40.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-12T15:16:43.000Z
- Description: Filed: 1895 · Solved: 1903 · the safety razor with throwaway blades · by King Gillette, salesman
- Author: The Clerk
- Tags: Solved, #solved 1903

*Three nicks on my chin and all the whiskers still standing.* — Man shaving, 1899

Until 1903, a man sharpened his razor every morning before he shaved, then shaved with whatever edge he'd managed. King Gillette was a salesman. The fellow who invented the bottle cap told him to come up with something people would use once and throw away. Gillette picked the razor blade. It took six years to make one thin enough and cheap enough. He sold 51 razors the first year and about 90,000 the next, and he put his own face on every wrapper. Mustache and all. Never trust a razor salesman with a mustache.

**Still bugs us**: the blades still go dull. Now we just throw them out and buy more.

### The full file

Before he sold razors, King Gillette wrote a book. In 1894 he published The Human Drift, a plan for one giant city called Metropolis, run on power from Niagara Falls, with 60 million people in 24,000 apartment towers. He said competition was the root of all evil. Then he went into the razor business.

He didn't make the blade work himself. An MIT-trained inventor named William Nickerson worked out how to mass-produce thin blades from sheet steel. The patent came through in 1904\. During World War I the government issued a khaki Gillette set to American soldiers, and about half a million of them found one in their kit.

Gillette stepped back from running the company in 1913\. The 1929 crash, patent fights and boardroom fights took his fortune, and he died in Los Angeles in 1932, a frustrated man. He never did care for the market. Turned out the feeling was mutual.