His ideas are not important for their uniqueness (though they are singular), but because of the essential similarities between his conservative business utopia and other versions of collectivism" (Gilbert, p. 12). This biographer reports that King Camp Gillette was born in January 1855, the fifth of seven children, to George Wolcott Gillette and Fanny Camp Gillette, in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin; when King was four years old, the family moved to Chicago, where King attended Skinners School. Following the disastrous Chicago fire, which destroyed much of his father's property as well, King worked with the hardware firm of Seeberger and Breakey. Two years later, he took a comparable job New York; as he later recalled of the time, "From the time I was twenty-one until the fall of 1904 I was a traveling man and sold goods throughout the United States and England, but traveling was not my only vocation...
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