He was a traveling salesman. He had always wanted to invent something, but he didn’t know what to invent.
He once sat down at a desk and went through the alphabet from A to Z trying to figure out what he might invent that people needed. It was no help. He still didn’t know what to invent.
Then, it came to him one morning as he was standing in front of a mirror shaving with an old-fashioned straight razor, the kind that had to be sent away to be sharpened. What this country needs, he thought is a little razor blade that you can use until it gets dull and then throw away.
He invented it and became very rich. His name was King Camp Gillette, and the razor blade he invented in 1903 became the razor with which most American men shaved.
70 million blade units were sold in 1915. In 1918, when the U.S. entered World War I, the US government issued all American soldiers a field razor set made by Gillette.
