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TRIVIA NEWSFRONT
(Answers on page 16)
Gillette has been a household word for more than 125 years, but how much do you know about the ingenious inventor who started the company? Follow along as Tidbits brings readers an account of this corporation’s founder.
• King Camp Gillette came by his creative temperament naturally, with a father who was a patent agent and a seasoned mechanical tinkerer. His mother, after years of experimenting and devising her own recipes, wrote a cookbook in 1887 that remained in print for 100 years.
• When Gillette was 16, his family’s possessions were lost in Chicago’s Great Fire of 1871, and the young man was compelled to go to work. He took a job as a traveling salesman, selling hardware items, all the while continuing to experiment with inventions. By 1890, he had been awarded four patents.
• During the 1890s, Gillette was working for the Crown Cork and Seal Company selling corks for bottles, noting that their product was discarded after use. When the company president learned of Gillette’s inventive genius, he asked if he could create “a product that would be used and then thrown away,” ensuring repeated purchases by consumers.
• After years of being on the road, Gillette was well familiar with shaving with a heavy straight edge razor with a wooden handle. The blade dulled quickly and had to be sharpened every day on a leather strop, eventually becoming too worn to sharpen. In 1895, Gillette took his employer’s advice and conceived the idea of a thin, inexpensive blade that could be thrown away and easily replaced once it grew dull.
First year sales were only 51 razors and 168 blades, increasing the following year to 90,000 razors and 12.4 million blades. Although the company earned a huge profit that year, Gillette actually sold the razors at a loss, making the profits on the blades. The razor handle was a one-time purchase with a spendy price tag of $5, about half a week’s pay for the average worker. The blades were sold in packaged multiples.
• By 1908, there were Gillette factories in the U.S., Canada, Great Britain, France, and Germany. King Gillette’s face was a familiar one, featured on the packaging, making him an internationally recognized figure.
• Blade sales in 1915 were 70 million units. In 1917, in the midst of World War I, Gillette issued all American soldiers a field razor set, financed by the U.S. Government.
• The stock market crash of 1929 left King Gillette nearly bankrupt and the value of his corporate shares plummeted. He had also spent much of his fortune on property, and was embroiled in patent battles.
• The company survived the financial crisis and continued to thrive after Gillette’s death in 1932. They added Foamy shaving cream to their line-up in 1953 and Right Guard deodorant in 1960. King Gillette would have been gratified to know his company was sold to Procter & Gamble in 2005 for $57 billion. □
1. MUSIC: Which band sang the theme song to TV’s “Friends”?
2. ANATOMY: What is the only bone in the human body that isn’t attached to another bone nearby?
3. LITERATURE: What is the setting for the “Anne of Green Gables” novel series?
4. TELEVISION: Who plays the lead role in the sitcom “Mr. Mayor”?
5. GEOGRAPHY: Where are the Spanish Steps located?
6. HISTORY: How long did the first man in space, Yuri Gagarin, orbit the planet?
7. AD SLOGANS: Which restaurant chain advises customers to “eat fresh”?
8. SCIENCE: What is the only form of energy that can be seen with the human eye?
9. ANIMAL KINGDOM: With which animal do humans share 98.8% of their DNA?
10. MOVIES: Which movie features the famous line, “I see dead people”? Answers
1. The Rembrandts (“I’ll Be There for You”).
2. The hyoid bone.
Bill LeGrave
• Gillette’s idea was to use a small strip of very thin steel with a sharp double edge, and secure it between two smooth plates held together by a screw-on “T” handle. But he was quickly informed by metallurgists that it would be impossible to manufacture such a blade since thin, cheap steel was too difficult to sharpen. It took Gillette six years to find an MITeducated engineer who finally found a way of transforming his idea into the mass-produced thin sheet metal blades he envisioned.
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• Gillette Safety Razor Company was founded in 1901, but production didn’t begin until 1903.
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Week of January 29, 2023 swelled to $1.5 million, requiring Disney to take out a mortgage on his home to help cover it. Although 25 songs were composed for the movie, only seven were actually used.
• Eighteen-year-old Adriana Caselotti was chosen over 150 other hopefuls to voice Snow White. She received $20 a day for her efforts, a total of $970 for the role, about $20,000 in today’s dollars. The studio required Caselotti to sign a contract forbidding her from taking any other voice work, because Walt Disney wanted to “own” the voice of Snow White, not wanting to “spoil the illusion of Snow White.” This, along with her name not being listed in the credits, wiped out any hopes of making a career in films for the young woman.
• Adriana Caselotti pursued opera for a time, then settled into real estate sales. In her later years, she autographed letters and photographs to supplement her income.
• Thirteen years passed before another princess film hit the theaters. “Cinderella” was released in 1950, with upwards of 300 young women auditioning for the voice. The role was awarded to Ilene Woods, whose songwriter friends had called her to record three of the film’s songs. They presented the demo recordings to Walt Disney, who called Woods two days later with the offer of “Cinderella.” Walt’s all-time favorite animation scene of all of his movies was when Cinderella’s dress transformed from her shabby garments to the beautiful blue ball gown.
• Cinderella lost her shoe not once, not twice, but three times in the 1950 film. The first is when she delivers breakfast trays to her stepmother and stepsisters, the second is as she runs away from the ball, and the third is as she walks down the steps at her wedding to the prince. Her actual shoe size is 4 ½, which explains why the other maidens in the kingdom had so much trouble squeezing into it!
• It shouldn’t be surprising that the Princess known for her sleeping is the most silent of them all. Aurora from 1959’s “Sleeping Beauty” has just 18 lines of dialogue and 18 minutes of screen time in the entire movie. Even when she is awakened by the Prince’s kiss, she doesn’t speak!
• The story is based on the Brothers Grimm tale called “Briar Rose,” a name used by Aurora while she lived with her three fairy godmothers. She was the last princess created before Walt Disney’s death in 1966. The film was the only princess film that was a commercial failure at its debut. With a budget of $6 million, “Sleeping Beauty” earned just $5.3 million at its debut.
The most iconic scene in Sleeping Beauty is the “Once Upon a Dream” sequence (called “Sequence 8” in development) where Aurora meets Prince Phillip for the first time. Walt Disney rejected the scene over and over again, nearly bankrupting the studio trying to get it right.
• After a 30-year drought of princesses, “The Little Mermaid” premiered in 1989, introducing the red-haired Ariel. The film’s animation was another monumental task, and due to a shortage of manpower at Disney, the company hired a Chinese animation studio to draw over a million bubbles by hand. And so marked the end of an era in which Disney films were created in the traditional method of hand-painting frames.
• After “The Little Mermaid,” digital animation became the modern practice. Of all the Disney characters, Ariel was the one who has sung more songs than any other. She was voiced by actress Jodi Benson, who also voiced the film’s character Vanessa, who was Ursula the Sea Witch in disguise.
• “The Little Mermaid” film collected $84 million for its debut, and another $27 million at its theater re-release eight years later. Its lifetime gross worldwide is $235 million on a budget of $40 million. Two Oscars were awarded for the film’s musical score and best song.
• Disney’s 1991 story of “Beauty and the Beast” was loosely based on a French fairy tale, “La Belle et la Bete.” Screenwriter for the film, Linda Woolverton, says that her interpretation of Belle was inspired by Katharine Hepburn’s performance as Jo March in the 1933 film “Little Women.” The idea for Belle’s yellow ball gown was borrowed from Audrey Hepburn’s gown in the 1953 movie “Roman Holiday.”