In 1895 King Camp Gillette was the salesman for the man who invented cork-lined bottle caps. "Invent something people use and throw away," the man told him. It'd sure worked for him.
Gillette wondered what he might invent. It hit him one morning while he was shaving. He thought up the safety razor, but he couldn't figure how to make good disposible blades. For years he struggled. Finally he met William Nickerson.
Nickerson was a fine inventor. This was a fine challenge. Nickerson finally saw that he could make the blade wide. He could let the holder bend it into position. Then he'd have both accuracy and a sharp edge. Together, Gillette and Nickerson began making safety razors in 1903.
The next question was what to name the thing. If they called a razor blade a Nickerson, that was too suggestive of nicked skin. In the end Gillette's name attached to the invention, and his face rode on the razor blade wrapper. Within a few years Gillette was a millionaire.
Now that's only the first half of Gillette's story. Howard Mansfield tells the rest, and it gets very interesting. The year before he cooked up the safety razor, Gillette published a book on another idea entirely. It was terrifying and idealistic.
His Utopian socialistic world would be based on universal cooperation. All production would be done efficiently by one great company with all people as shareholders. "Selfishness would be unknown, and war would be a barbarism of the past," he wrote.
He imagined all 60 million Americans living in one great Metropolis. It'd be powered by the Niagara River. It'd have a hundred million rooms and be served by vast common dining halls.
Before WW-I he tried to set up his World Corporation -- this time in the Arizona Territory. He asked Teddy Roosevelt to be its president. When that failed, he turned to social reformer and writer Sinclair Lewis. Lewis arranged a disastrous meeting between Gillette and Henry Ford. The two millionaires talked past each other. Finally, they simply shouted in anger.
Lewis also helped Gillette with his most cogent statement -- a book called The People's Corporation. Even that was naive at best. Stuart Chase said that his sincerity was deep and compelling. "... but his solution is quite untouched by the realities which guard the road to Utopia."
In his last years Gillette tried to extract oil from shale. He still had his inventive verve. But he carried his socialism to the grave. He didn't see that the simple elegance of his safety razor was no match for the complexity of human affairs.
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Forten was president and founder of the American Moral Reform Society and was active in the American Anti-Slavery Society. He was a vigorous opponent of northern implementation of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793. Forten died in Philadelphia on March 4, 1842.  Return to Last Page

Henry Ford, born on July 30, 1863, was the first of William and Mary Ford's six children. He grew up on a prosperous family farm in what is today Dearborn, Michigan. Henry enjoyed a childhood typical of the rural nineteenth century, spending days in a one-room school and doing farm chores. At an early age, he showed an interest in mechanical things and a dislike for farm work.
In 1879, sixteen-year-old Ford left home for the nearby city of Detroit to work as an apprentice machinist, although he occasionally returned to help on the farm. He remained an apprentice for three years and then returned to Dearborn. During the next few years, Henry divided his time between operating or repairing steam engines, finding occasional work in a Detroit factory, and over-hauling his father's farm implements, as well as lending a reluctant hand with other farm work. Upon his marriage to Clara Bryant in 1888, Henry supported himself and his wife by running a sawmill.
Ford became an engineer with the Edison Illuminating Company in Detroit. This event signified a conscious decision on Ford's part to dedicate his life to industrial pursuits. His promotion to Chief Engineer in 1893 gave him enough time and money to devote attention to his personal experiments on internal combustion engines.
These experiments culminated in 1896 with the completion of his own self-propelled vehicle-the Quadricycle. The Quadricycle had four wire wheels that looked like heavy bicycle wheels, was steered with a tiller like a boat, and had only two forward speeds with no reverse. Although Ford was not the first to build a self-propelled vehicle with a gasoline engine, he was, however, one of several automotive pioneers who helped this country become a nation of motorists.
Ford Motor Company Incorporated and the Introduction of the Model TAfter two unsuccessful attempts to establish a company to manufacture automobiles, the Ford Motor Company was incorporated in 1903 with Henry Ford as vice-president and chief engineer. The infant company produced only a few cars a day at the Ford factory on Mack Avenue in Detroit. Groups of two or three men worked on each car from components made to order by other companies.
Henry Ford realized his dream of producing an automobile that was reasonably priced, reliable, and efficient with the introduction of the Model T in 1908. This vehicle initiated a new era in personal transportation. It was easy to operate, maintain, and handle on rough roads, immediately becoming a huge success. By 1918, half of all cars in America were Model Ts. To meet the growing demand for the Model T, the company opened a large factory at Highland Park, Michigan, in 1910. Here, Henry Ford combined precision manufacturing, standardized and interchangeable parts, a division of labor, and, in 1913, a continuous moving assembly line. Workers remained in place, adding one component to each automobile as it moved past them on the line. Delivery of parts by conveyor belt to the workers was carefully timed to keep the assembly line moving smoothly and efficiently. The introduction of the moving assembly line revolutionized automobile production by significantly reducing assembly time per vehicle, thus lowering costs. Ford's production of Model Ts made his company the largest automobile manufacturer in the world.
The company began construction of the world's largest industrial complex along the banks of the Rouge River in Dearborn, Michigan, during the late 1910s and early 1920s. The massive Rouge Plant included all the elements needed for automobile production: a steel mill, glass factory, and automobile assembly line. Iron ore and coal were brought in on Great Lakes steamers and by railroad, and were used to produce both iron and steel. Rolling mills, forges, and assembly shops transformed the steel into springs, axles, and car bodies. Foundries converted iron into engine blocks and cylinder heads that were assembled with other components into engines. By September 1927, all steps in the manufacturing process from refining raw materials to final assembly of the automobile took place at the vast Rouge Plant, characterizing Henry Ford's idea of mass production.  Return to Last Page

"Father" of the petroleum industry, born in Greenville, New York; he spent his boyhood in Castleton Corners and attended local schools.
Drake worked a succession of jobs in the Midwest and East after leaving the family farm at age 19, ending up as a conductor for the New York & New Haven Railroad (1850-57). In the late 1850s he bought stock in George Bissell's Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company, and in 1857 (taking advantage of his conductor's job to travel free) he traveled to see the land near Oil Creek (Titusville), Pennsylvania, where surface oil was being collected.
Having observed the drilling of artesian wells in New York and Pennsylvania, he shared Bissell's idea of borrowing from that technology to drill for oil in Titusville. The Seneca Oil Company was formed with now "Colonel" Drake as president. He secured a lease and began experimenting in 1858, striking oil at 69 feet on August 27, 1859, effectively the first true oil well.
He neglected to patent his drilling invention, a pipe liner for the drill hole, and proved to be a poor businessman, losing his savings to oil speculation in New York City (1863). He drifted for several years, returning to Pennsylvania in 1870 ill and impoverished. The citizens of Titusville collected some money for him and he was voted an annuity by the state legislature in 1876.
Drake had given birth to an industry which would dominate the 20th century, but would die a pauper.
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The Chrysler Corporation became the second largest U.S. automaker during the 1930s. By this time Chrysler was a self-made millionaire and began turning his attention to other activities, including financing and helping design the Chrysler building in New York City. He resigned from the Chrysler Corporation in 1935, at age 60, and died August 18, 1940.
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Lloyd G. Balfour was born in Wauseon, Ohio; attended public schools in Louisville, Kentucky; graduated from the University of Louisville and Indiana University Law School; and following brief careers in the fields of law and sales, he came to Attleboro, Massachusetts with the specific intent of founding a jewelry company that would have high standards for excellence of product and quality of its personnel. Mildred McCann Balfour grew up in North Attleboro, Massachusetts and studied at the University of Illinois. Lloyd and Mildred met around 1918 and they were married in 1921. Together they worked to build the L. G. Balfour Company into the giant that it became.
The Balfours lived in a log cabin on a working farm. Their home, located on Pine Street in Norton, was the scene of many gatherings of friends and associates.
There was another side to the Balfours, one that was rigorously safe guarded. They participated in many philanthropic deeds but with little fanfare. They were generous to many schools and hospitals; to many local students who could not have attended college without this support; and to distressed families needing support over the rough spots.
Lloyd Balfour died at his home on July 11, 1973, at the age of 87. Mildred survived him by a decade. Under the terms of his will, the L. G. Balfour Foundation, was founded. It is designed to help support the causes that Lloyd and Mildred supported during their lifetimes.
The people of the Town of Norton are grateful for the Balfour Foundation grant that has helped them to finance their new library building. The citizens of Norton will be ever mindful of the generosity of this fine couple. Return to Last Page