Vibrating to the future

The New Straits Times of Malaysia has a great article on Gillette and the M3Power. Along with some of the usual comments about razors and shaving, author Jeremy Mahadevan has some interesting asides about King Gillette and his non-shaving-related ideas.

But anyway: moustache-taming tools were not meant to be Gillette’s major contribution to the world. Before he released his elegant razor, before he infamously had a shouting match with fellow epoch-definer Henry Ford, Gillette published a book outlining his vision of a Utopian nation, where all goods are produced by a single great company, in which every citizen holds shares, and where "Selfishness would be unknown, and war would be a barbarism of the past."

He envisioned a single Metropolis, powered by Niagara Falls and housing 60 million souls in millions of identical rooms, all fed in numerous common dining halls. At one point he tried (and failed) to get Teddy Roosevelt to head the "People’s Corporation".

Mahadevan's other comments are interesting as well.