“F--k Everything, We're Doing Five Blades”

Before we begin, you should know that this episode contains some foul language.

So I'm sitting here right now looking at an old issue of the satirical newspaper, The Onion.

It's from February 17th, 2004, though I just ordered it off the internet a few weeks ago, and it's a time capsule.

The front page has a headline about Osama bin Laden and another about John Kerry, who was running for president at the time.

There's also one about Martha Stewart, who was on trial.

But the reason I ordered the issue isn't for any story that ran on the cover.

It's for a story that ran on page four.

And it was pretty timely too.

It was just in the middle of that period where like the Mach 3 was the biggest shit in the world.

Carol Kolb was the editor-in-chief of The Onion, and she's talking about a razor, like the kind people used to shave.

And the reason this razor was the biggest shit in the world is that it was the first ever razor to have three blades.

Mach 3 from Gillette, the first triple blade shaving system.

Three blades specially positioned to shave progressively closer.

You take one stroke, it takes three.

So you don't have to shape.

When the Mach 3 came out in 1998, it was a splashy new product and a huge seller for Gillette, the company that dominated the razor business, not just in terms of sales, but in terms of innovation.

Based in Boston with a research lab in Great Britain, a staff of razor scientists, and scores of proprietary patents, Gillette had been rolling out top-of-the-line razors for nearly a century, products that had made it number one.

Except then.

Did Schick come out with a four-blade razor then?

Okay, two blades are better than one, and three blades are better than two.

And that's as good as it gets, right?

Wrong.

In September 2003, Schick, which had lagged behind Gillette for decades, got the four blades first.

Four blades.

Where will it stop?

Here.

An Onion Writer wasn't so sure it would stop there, though, and pitched a headline that was also a prediction.

A headline that ended up on page four of the issue.

I bought off the internet.

The headline was, fuck everything.

We're doing five blades.

And so it was just like, well, you know, if they're going to fucking, if they're going to step up to us, we're going to fucking beat them down.

We're going straight to five.

Fuck everything.

We're doing five blades was pitched and written by the onion staffer Joe Garden.

It appeared in the paper as an op-ed attributed to the then CEO and president of Gillette.

It reads in part, Would someone tell me how this happened?

We were the fucking vanguard of shaving in the country.

The Gillette Mach 3 was the razor to own.

But you know what happened next?

Shut up.

I'm telling you what happened.

The bastards went to four blades.

Now we're standing around with our cocks in our hands, selling three blades and a lubrication strip.

It was just like, I'm a fucking businessman, and this is my life.

This is my life.

And if someone's going to like, you know, fucking step into my court, I'm going to slap them down.

You want to fucking, you want to fucking take our shit and go to four?

We're going to like fucking.

go to five, baby.

They did proceed to do that.

Did they go straight to five?

Yeah.

Oh, they did.

Oh, that's great.

See, that's great.

The onion definitely had a lot of moments where we would, you know, predict the future like that.

Go to five, straight to five, baby.

Come on.

I'm Willa Paskin, and this is Decodering.

In the early 2000s, an arms race broke out in the world of men's shaving.

After decades with razors that had only one blade, and then decades with razors that had only two, the number of blades rapidly spiraled up and up and up.

It's a skirmish sometimes referred to as the razor blade wars and it was a face-off about innovation, competition, capitalism, masculinity, and most of all, how strange things become after you've created something that's the best a consumer can get.

And then you have to keep going.

So today, on decodering, fuck everything, we're talking five blades and whether it makes sense for a razor to have them.

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So before razors had names like Mach 3 and Quattro, all a razor was was a blade, a blade known as a straight razor.

And in general, people didn't use one for themselves.

The idea of shaving yourself would have struck like 19th century Americans as very, very odd.

Rebecca Herzig is a professor of gender and sexuality studies at Bates College and the author of, among other books, Plocked, A History of Hair Removal.

If people wanted to get a shave, they would go see a trained barber and sit down and do that scene that, you know, where, you know, they put the hot, warm towel on your face.

That's because of how a straight razor works.

It's this unsheathed, sturdy, stiff, very sharp piece of metal that can last a lifetime, but it's a hassle.

It had to be stropped before every use by running it back and forth on a piece of leather.

And eventually, even that wouldn't keep it sharp enough.

So it would need to be honed, brought into a barber or a cutler who could put a new edge on it.

It was dangerous, too.

If you weren't careful, it could easily live up to its other name, the cutthroat blade.

But as the 20th century dawned, an alternative was coming, thanks to a man named King Camp Gillette.

King Gillette was born in 1855 and grew up in Chicago.

Pleasant, personable, and tall with a paintbrush mustache, he was a lifelong tinkerer with a number of patents to his name.

But he made his living as a traveling salesman, which he was very good at.

He was very soft-spoken, but also quite charming.

Tim Dowling is a writer and columnist at The Guardian and the author of a book about King Gillette.

And I think there's this kind of what you might call self-abnegation, this salesman's way of disappearing and making you feel very important.

When he was in his late 30s, Gillette was hired by a man who was just about to invent something called the crown cork, what we now call the bottle cap.

The bottle cap was the first, truly the first mass market disposable item.

19th century Americans just did not have disposable products around.

And Gillette's boss, the bottle cap inventor, encouraged Gillette to try and invent something disposable too.

So Gillette is constantly thinking about that sort of thing.

He's going through the alphabet, thinking of things that he could apply this disposable notion to.

And then one day in 1895, it came to him.

He's standing in front of his bathroom mirror with a very dull razor in his hand.

And this idea dawns on him for a disposable.

safety razor.

What flashed into Gillette's mind looks a lot like the razor as we know it, a T-shaped instrument with a very thin, sharp blade.

The T-shaped safety razor already existed, though.

So the thing Gillette was imagining for the first time was this new kind of mass-produced blade.

One so thin and thus so cheap, you could throw it away when it got dull.

Gillette immediately wrote his wife, crowing, our fortune is made.

It would take a while, though.

From then on, nothing good happens.

When it comes to razors, simple ideas are hard to execute.

They are, after all, a knife that you press directly onto your skin.

There's much less margin for error with them than most household items.

It would take six years until Gillette found someone with the expertise to make his super thin, super sharp razor blade real.

A man named William Nickerson.

Quite a last name for a razor guy.

Nickerson and Gillette and a number of other investors incorporated the company in 1901, the same year they applied for their patent.

They began selling the Gillette double-edged safety razor in 1903.

To use it, you slotted the blade in perpendicular to the handle, screwed it into place, and then when one side of the blade got dull, you could flip the razor around and use the other.

In terms of safety, convenience, and time spent, it was a vast improvement on the straight razor.

But in order to succeed, the company didn't just need to sell its product.

It needed to sell sell a whole new norm.

The norm of the clean shave.

So as I mentioned earlier, going into the 20th century, most men did not shave themselves.

They went to the barber, but that was time consuming and expensive.

So middle and lower class men did not shave with anything like modern day regularity.

Scruff abounded.

Gillette needed to convince men that scruff was unappealing and that shaving should be a safe, daily, solitary ritual conducted at home.

The company started by teaching men how to shave for themselves.

Use a different edge each day and you'll get an equal amount of use from both.

That's what this man does.

He's wise.

He washes before shaving

and lathers very thoroughly.

This is half the battle, really.

In other advertisements, Gillette told customers where to shave, not at the barbers who it impugned as effeminate.

It also suggested why men should shave, to be clean and hygienic, supposedly unlike the swaths of new immigrants, particularly from Eastern and Southern Europe, streaming into America at the time.

And all of this worked.

Between 1905 and 1917, Gillette saw its sales go up 20-fold.

But its real breakthrough came during World War I.

when it taught men how often to shave.

As the U.S.

entered the war, Gillette landed a contract with the U.S.

government to supply every serviceman with a Gillette shaving kit.

A shorn face helped get a good seal on a gas mask.

By the time the war was over, Gillette had sold over 3.5 million razors and 32 million blades.

But even more importantly, it had gotten a generation of men into the habit of using Gillette products to shave every day, elevating the clean shave into a masculine ideal it had just not been before.

In just two decades, Gillette had created its own customer, and it had done all of that with just one measly blade.

But more blades were coming.

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This week, we're following the real-time collapse of public health in the U.S.

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One of RFK Jr.'s long-standing targets has been vaccines.

A poor Vimandavili at the New York Times says, he's trying to make it difficult for big pharma to make them available at all.

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Check out What Next, wherever you listen.

In the decades that followed World War I, Gillette established itself as the globe's dominant razor company, a huge, publicly traded multinational with around 70% of the razor market.

It held off competitors by regularly rolling out proprietary improvements whenever its patents were about to expire.

Improvements including rust-resistant and coated blades, adjustable handles, and razor cartridges.

And as it did this, it also branched out into other product lines, like razors for women.

Shaving and women is a topic unto itself.

It's a habit that took off during World War II and was made even more out of whole cloth than the clean shave was for men.

But I'm mentioning women's razors here mostly to say I won't be mentioning them much again.

It's the men's market that has driven razor innovation.

And in 1971, Gillette rolled out a doozy of one.

This is a revolutionary new shaving system from Gillette.

It has one blade that gets what an ordinary razor gets, and then it has another one that gets what an ordinary razor leaves behind.

The Track 2 was Gillette's first two-bladed razor, known as a twin blade.

It had two angled metal blades stacked atop one another inside a disposable plastic razor cartridge.

It's one blade better than whatever you're using now.

When the Track 2 came out, Gillette and every other razor company had been selling single-bladed razors for almost 70 years, and they'd worked just fine.

Well, even.

So the product was met with some skepticism.

The triple track, because you'll believe anything.

That's a spoof from the first ever episode of Saturday Night Live.

Adding a razor blade is an improvement so simple, it seems like something a three-year-old could come up with.

And SNL was lampooning anyone gullible enough to buy into it by comparing this new double-bladed product to what then seemed like a patently absurd impossibility.

The idea of a three-bladed razor.

But as I said before, when it comes to razors, simple ideas can be hard to execute.

And Gillette insisted that the Track 2 could provide a closer and more comfortable shave.

The two things the company was always explicitly chasing.

Harry, make sure you get a close shave and don't cut yourself.

You gotta look good for the wedding pictures.

Don't worry, this is a track two.

Two blades, but recessed, so they're safe.

Real people also seem to think the track two was an improvement.

It was a smash for the company.

The whole like is an extra blade bullshit never occurred to me because I think most people would agree that two blades probably does work a little bit better.

It just didn't seem excessive.

Dan Capelle is a writer and journalist who has written a lot about razors.

So much so that I've come to think of him as something of a razor blade zealig.

This is kind of personal, but I was very young.

in school.

Like I entered college when I was 17.

I wasn't even able to shave then.

So like shaving became this like real symbol of manhood, of sexuality, of like, you know, being able to relate with humans in a physical way.

And I got really into it really early, you know, like I always liked shaving and trying different razors.

When Dan was beginning to shave, the most popular Gillette razor among his peers was a two-bladed razor, but it wasn't the track two.

It was a fully disposable plastic razor with a track two head on it and the unassuming name Good News.

it came out around the time that there was a lot of bad news in the world like watergate inflation was a huge problem so there was a lot of bad news right two blades are better than one blade i get the big shea back in debt two blades are better than one blade that's the good news razor from gillette initially the good news was a big success for gillette until it became a really big problem

solving it would ultimately launch the razor blade wars two

The good news was a fully disposable plastic razor.

When I say fully disposable, I mean forget just tossing the blade or the cartridge that held them.

The cartridge was molded to the handle in this case.

So when the blade got dull, you just threw the whole thing away.

This made the good news really convenient.

It was also really cheap.

It cost like a quarter.

That was the price of one track two cartridge.

And this created a long-term problem for Gillette.

For decades, the company had made money on shaving systems, razors that had two parts, handles and blades.

At the beginning, the handles had been expensive, but the company had long since transitioned, so they sold the handles for not so much and made most of their money on blades and cartridges.

This model of selling the platform at a low cost and locking people into refilling it at a high one is also how printers and cell phones work.

It is so associated with Gillette, though, that it is literally called the Razors and Blades model.

But now, with the good news, disposable razor, Gillette was walking away from that.

It was undercutting its own bottom line, turning customers who used to buy expensive proprietary razor systems into consumers of a much cheaper, dinkier product that was indistinguishable from what other companies were selling.

Gillette is this company that is shaving, and yet they had kind of like, sorry, I'm going to say this, they kind of shit the bed.

The company that had helped invent disposability was now selling a product that was too disposable.

By the late 80s, with profits flat, corporate raiders circling, and disposable razors close to 50% of sales, some executives finally decided to tackle the problem.

A blunt British executive named John Simons led the rebrand.

He hated disposables so much that in one meeting, he threw some good news razors on the ground and crushed them under his heel.

Under Simons, Gillette wouldn't stop selling disposables altogether, but it did stop advertising them, even as it planned to re-advertise the whole company.

Gillette was not going to be known as the purveyor of something hollow, disposable, cheap, and plastic.

It was about luxury, quality, manliness, steel.

It was.

Jillette,

the best of men to get

Jillette premiered this soaring anthemic commercial during the 1989 Super Bowl.

It shows men slogging through mud, crushing it at the stock exchange, laughing in tuxes with their buds, running to their women, embracing their fathers, cradling their infant sons.

It is so earnest and corny and 80s, and it works so well, so well.

Gillette would use this slogan until 2019.

The ad wasn't made to sell any one particular razor, but about six months after the campaign premiered, Gillette announced they had a revolutionary new product on the way.

Their first completely new razor in 13 years.

A product that was going to prove Gillette was, you know.

Gillette said it had spent years and nearly $100 million researching, developing, testing, and marketing this secret new razor.

It was exactly like when Apple and Steve Jobs used to introduce the iPhone, you know, and it was a big secret and, you know, everyone was trying to get one and looking for prototypes.

That's Dan Capella again.

Around this time, he was covering the men's grooming market for the trade paper ad week.

He became determined to figure out what exactly this new razor was.

I was really insanely competitive about that kind of stuff back then.

I just was like, I got to find this out and I am going to find it out and nobody is going to beat me on it and I am going to be the one to figure out what this fucking razor looks like.

Dan didn't want to speculate.

He wanted specs.

So after a few dead ends, he headed to New York's patent library.

Gillette was smart enough not to file patents under the company name.

Too obvious.

But patents also have locations on them and and Gillette is based in Boston.

So Dan pulled all the patents registered in Boston for the previous two years and then spent five days combing through them.

Sure enough, a lot of them were for razors.

Eventually, Dan found what he was looking for.

Adweek ran a piece scooping Gillette's own announcement by a few weeks.

The new razor would have a couple of innovations, a refined pivot head and blades individually mounted on springs.

Blades numbering

two.

Just two.

That's right.

This new razor called Sensor was also a twin blade.

But the reason I've taken all this time telling you about it is that the rollout worked incredibly well.

Sensor not only sold 24 million razors in just a year, it created a blueprint for how Gillette would proceed, develop tech-heavy, patented razors, market the hell out of them, and charge a lot for the cartridges.

Eight years later, in 1998, Gillette announced that it had a new razor coming.

This one with a cumulative price tag of close to a billion dollars.

And you know how many blades this one had.

Of Mach 3 from Gillette, the first triple blade shaving system.

Three blades specially positioned to shave progressively closer.

You take one stroke, it takes three.

Gillette had finally gone three blades, but adding a blade to a razor still sounds kind of silly.

So this time around, it was the sketch comedy show Mad TV that mocked it in 1999.

Spishack presents the Mach 20.

With 20 blades, we guarantee you the closest shave of your life.

That could be the edge I need to make me a first-rate professional businessman.

It sure could.

Watch this.

But the joke didn't do much damage.

The Mach 3 soon had $2 billion in sales.

It had taken Gillette 68 years to go two blades and then 27 more to go three.

And we'll never know how long it would have taken them to get to four on their own time.

Because another company beat them to it.

Hey, I'm Candace Lem, and I'm Kate Lindsay, and we're the hosts of ICYMI, Slate's podcast about internet culture.

On a recent episode, we had to talk about a certain somebody's tweets, and that somebody happens to be my governor, Gavin Newsome.

If you haven't seen them recently, they've kind of gone, let's say, off the rails.

There was some Fox News host he just called a ding-dong.

It was like.

And as Slate's Luke Winky tells us, this isn't the first time the California governor tried to capitalize on the country's mood of the moment.

I'm in a group chat with some men from California.

Okay.

A male journalist who used to cover California politics.

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Find out by listening to the whole episode on ICYMI and be sure to follow ICYMI now wherever you get your podcasts.

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So I've been talking as if there's only one razor company in the world.

And while Gillette really has been dominant, the McDonald's of shaving, there's always a Burger King too.

And the Burger King of shaving in America is Schick.

It's your face to let Schick.

It's your face to let Shick Dove it.

The Schick Razor Company, founded by Joseph Schick, went into business back in 1926, selling an injector razor modeled on a repeating rifle.

Schick sold his company in 1928 to go and work on the razor closest to his heart, the electric razor, which he was the first person to patent.

But his original outfit stayed in business, cornering about 20 to 30 percent of the global market while changing hands a number of times.

As the 2000s dawned, it had a kind of sleepy reputation.

It really had been, overall, more a stayed number two company that kind of accepted the fact that we were number two.

Amy Roman now works at Channel Program, a social media startup for the tech industry, but she was a senior brand manager, a chick at the time.

We didn't compete with Gillette.

We didn't have the budgets that they had.

We didn't have the market share that they had.

But right around the time that Amy started, there was a big leadership change.

The new guys were more ambitious.

Amy heard they were working on a big secret project and she wanted in.

When she found out what it was, she wasn't exactly bowled over.

You know, it wasn't like, oh, four blades, you know, because it's like, okay, four blades, but so what?

There's a blade, there's two, there's three, and then you add a fourth, and it's like, well, why is this meaningful?

To be honest, I'd been expecting a different answer.

Something about how hearing the news of Shick's four-bladed razor was the most exciting moment of her life.

But now, after thinking about it for a while, I really admire Amy's reaction.

It's just so reasonable.

A three-bladed razor had come out a few years before, its maker crowing about how closely it could shave a man.

How much more could a fourth blade really offer?

And could what it offered really matter?

Like, how many blades did men really think their stubble needed?

A lot of blades, as it turned out.

American consumers were way more excited about four blades than Amy was.

Or maybe she's just really good at her job.

She ended up running the Schick Quattro release.

And when it came out in September of 2003, it was Schick's most successful product launch ever.

And one of the rare times they beat Gillette to market.

Yeah, it was a big deal.

We were talking about about three blades, three blades, three blades, and then Quattro came out.

Michelle Chennault was the head of communications for Gillette.

You know, the party line was, no, it's not about the number of blades.

We don't care.

You know, we're the market leader.

But internally, it caused a lot of dialogue, like, uh-oh, uh-oh, what does this mean?

And then, of course, the advertising wars started.

Yeah, it was a shit shot.

Lawsuits started flying.

Among them, Gillette sued Schick for allegedly building on proprietary Mach 3 patents and tried to get an injunction against the Quattro.

Schick countersued, arguing that Gillette no longer had the right to use the best a man can get slogan because it no longer had the best products.

Eventually, the two companies settled out of court, but these deliciously petty lawsuits only added to the sense that something ridiculous was going on.

The ongoing conflict in Iraq remains our most serious threat overseas, but here at home, there's a multi-billion dollar war being fought every day concerning which razor should men shape with.

Gillette or Schick?

This is a 2004 segment from The Daily Show in which Rob Cordry interviews both Amy Roman and Michelle Chennault about the Razor Wars.

You can hear Michelle in this next clip.

The Mach 3 is amazing.

You know, it's like an antique.

It's almost like an antique, except it's brand new.

Some months later, The Onion imagined the only thing that can make the situation more absurd.

Escalation.

It published Fuck Everything, We're Doing Five Blades in early 2004.

You'll remember that the piece was a faux op-ed written in the imagined voice of Gillette's CEO, a guy who said things like, Are they the best a man can get?

Fuck no, Gillette is the best a man can get.

Though it's connected to the spoofs that preceded it, it's also a little different.

The punchline isn't the gullible consumer, but a mentality, one that isn't concerned with whether more blades are objectively better, because it knows more blades are always better.

It captures an attitude in which more is more, best and most mean the same thing, and intensification is always the answer, no matter how stupid.

It's about razors, but it's bigger than razors.

It's funny, but it's not just a joke.

And it was prescient too.

A year and a half after the piece was published, its prophecy came true.

Introducing

the miracle of fusion.

It had taken Gillette 30 years to go three blades, but now instead of milking an innovation for the length of its patent, it skipped four blades altogether and went straight to five with the fusion, which even had an additional blade, a sixth blade on the back for trimming sideburns.

It cost about $5 a cartridge.

Gillette's real CEO, sounding an awful lot like the character in the onion op-ed, insisted, The shick launch has nothing to do with this.

It's like comparing a Ferrari to to a Volkswagen.

Even if you are trying to avoid watching the video of Charlie Kirk's shooting, social media makes it really hard.

And it's not like it's some crazy niche thing where you have to go and, you know, find a snuff film somewhere.

It's actually on the biggest social media platforms in the world, which is kind of crazy.

Now that platforms have essentially ditched content moderation, is this our future?

There's probably never been a time in human history where you had so much extremely graphic, violent imagery that not only was available to you at the drop of a hat, but also that in some cases, whether you wanted it or not, might end up showing up in front of you.

I'm Lizzie O'Leary.

Listen to my conversation with Craig Silverman, one of the smartest journalists thinking about the internet, on Friday's What Next TV Derever You get your podcasts.

Going Five Blades worked.

The Fusion sold well and is still Gillette's flagship product.

But also,

it didn't.

The Razor Blade Wars seemed petty and absurd.

Five Blades might shave a bit closer, but the cartridges are big and hard to clean.

They irritate more people's skin, they cost a lot, and it's not clear they're an improvement on three blades, or at least not to Dan Capelle.

I told you he was a razor blade zealot, and I meant it.

In 2015, he wrote an extremely in-depth review of razors for the consumer product site Wirecutter.

He personally tested hundreds of razors and assembled a whole panel to do so as well.

We did like a legit many months test because it takes a while.

to evaluate a razor.

It's not like just one shave and you're done.

You have to see how long the blade lasts.

You have to see whether it cuts you early, late, you know, different kinds of face and skin.

There was a clear winner.

I found, and all of our testers pretty much agreed that Gillette did the best, the Gillette Mach 3.

Shaving is idiosyncratic.

So

I wouldn't deny anyone their pleasure in any particular razor they would want.

But from sort of an objective standpoint, I don't think it makes much sense to go over three blades.

What I want you to take from this is less a straight-up product recommendation than a sense that by three blades, if not sooner, razors were good enough that so-called improvements were a way to sell a new, but not always meaningfully better product.

Tellingly, Gillette has held the line at five blades, even as some other brands have moved on to six and seven.

They're still chasing closeness, though, now with heated and vibrating handles, lubrication strips, and razors with names like the Fusion Pro Guide Flexball.

The debut of that razor was attended by the Atlantic journalist Caitlin Tiffany when she was writing about the razor market for Vox.

They had this big press event and then announced that it could cut your hair

23 microns shorter than the previous razor.

Have I ever looked at someone's face and been like, I think you missed the last 23 microns?

With improvements so microscopic, maybe it's no wonder that Gillette, which is now owned by Procter ⁇ Gamble, has seen its market share fall to 50%,

even as the whole razor market has gotten smaller.

Young people have different attitudes about body and facial hair, and they shave less.

The thing Gillette has been chasing and selling for a century, the ideal of the close, clean shave,

may not be what people want anymore.

And while we're sorting out exactly what it is that we do want, there has been an explosion of razor companies focused on things other than microns.

Do you think your razor needs a vibrating handle, a flashlight, a back scratcher, and 10 blades?

Your handsome-ass grandfather had one blade and polio.

That's from a viral advertisement for the direct-to-consumer brand Dollar Shave Club, which along with Harry's has undercut Gillette by selling cheap blades with an unfussy macho ethos.

There's also a gender neutral line from Bic and companies that offer chic new colorways.

Most head spinning of all, though, is that there are now a number of startups focused on comfort and easily irritated skin that all proudly sell a sleek new razor with just one blade.

Two years ago, we launched the single-edge safety razor.

This is starting to feel like the snake eating its own tail.

There's a reason for that.

A razor is already a pretty perfect invention.

However,

there are enough companies that want your business that they need to come up with a different version of a razor to sell you.

It's kind of one of the,

I don't know, weird oddities, I think, of late capitalism is that

competition isn't necessarily producing a superior result for customers.

It's just producing more results.

It's a world of companies going metaphorically five blades, whether we need them to or not.

As it turns out, there's a man from earlier in this story who was a little skeptical about the workings of capitalism and competition too.

King Camp Gillette.

Right around the time he was racking his brain for disposable inventions, on the verge of coming up with his razor, he was also thinking about something else.

a capitalism-free utopia.

In 1894, against the backdrop of the economic tensions of the Gilded Age and during a widespread craze for imagining America's future, Gillette published a book called The Human Drift.

In it, he outlined a system for the ideal society.

He imagined it consisting of a perfect corporation, free of competition, run by and for the people, who would all live in 40-story apartment buildings in one giant metropolis on the shores of Niagara Falls, which would power everything.

So, you know, it had some kinks.

Surprisingly, Gillette and his plan were championed by a progressive publication, and just as he could have focused on promoting it, he imagined his razor and turned to that instead.

But for the rest of his life, he never totally abandoned his utopian ideas.

When asked how he, a hugely successful capitalist, could rail against the extremes of capitalism and competition for profit, He replied to the effect of:

in whatever system he finds himself, a man has to do his best.

I have a sad story to tell you.

It may hurt your feelings a bit too.

Last night when I walked into my bathroom,

I stepped in a big pile of shavy green.

Clean, nice, and clean.

Shave every day, and you'll always look keen.

Decodering is written and produced by Willip Haskin.

This episode was produced by Elizabeth Nakano.

Derek John is senior supervising producer of narrative podcasts for Slate, and Merit Jacob is our technical director.

Thank you to Eric Krause, Jim Serowicki, Susan Strasser, Josh Levine, Dan Koise, and Benjamin Frisch.

Ben is Decodering's founding and now departing producer.

I wish wish him so much luck with his future projects and you can find him on Twitter at Benjamin Frisch.

F-R-I-S-C-H.

There are a number of books and articles that were instrumental to researching the story and we'll have links to them on our show page.

You can find me on Twitter at Willipaskin.

And if you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, you can email us at decodering at slate.com.

And if you're a fan of the show, I'd love for you to sign up for Slate Plus.

Slate Plus members get to listen to Decodering without any ads, and they're supporting the work that we do more generally.

Members will also get to hear a special behind-the-scenes episode with me at the end of this season.

So please go to slate.com/slash decoder plus to sign up now.

I would really appreciate your support.

Thanks so much for listening.

This is the first of five episodes in this season, and we're going to be back next week with an episode all about method acting and what on earth it really is.

We'll see you then.