So your saying that the end point is rather unclear....ABC sets most likely went beyond the 1915 date?Yeah! Don't tell me what to -- Oh well, since I'm already here...
I wasn't saying that there definitely was a change. I was just giving an example of a reason why they might have changed the inscription, which would otherwise seem like a strange thing to do.
What would the significance of 1915 be one way or the other? From the other thread it looks like the patent numbered cases start around 1914, and I really wouldn't expect to see an ABC set past 1915 give or take, though that end point is really still rather unclear.
That's very interesting. It's also interesting that the head is stamped in the same fashion as some of those Single Rings that we see coming out of England, like elmerwood mentioned. I wonder if it was supplied unstamped to the Gillette plant that was operating in Leicester prior to WWI and the stamping was applied there. There's another aspect of the serial number that would suggest that it didn't come out of the Boston plant stamped that way, and that's the fact that they used a leading zero on the number: G051727. The way the Boston plant did it was to just leave a blank, so if it were stamped there I'd expect it to be "G 51727" instead. But the Canadian and British plants did seem to use leading zeroes.
If I were going to enter into the realm of totally wild conjecture, I might hypothesize that, as the likely main entry point into into the European market, perhaps the British plant used different letter prefixes to designate the destination country for the razor sets during these early years -- "E" for razors sold directly in the English market, "F" for France, "G" for Germany, etc. That's mostly just me talking out of my backside at this point, though.
That aside, the 1913 date that's scratched on the back is certainly possible. It's earlier than the 1914 date where we have seen the case inscription change to the patent numbers, and it's also before the start of the war when the Leicester plant would have definitely still been operating.
Gillette pocket edition
- Thread starter nightguard
- Start date
So your saying that the end point is rather unclear....ABC sets most likely went beyond the 1915 date?
Can any of these books or materials be bought? I would be interested.The only other resources I have appear to be alternate publishings of the same material that is in that Magistrates Cases piece, such as these from Law Reports: King's Bench Division and Law Reports: Queen's Bench Division. I'm also a bit more inclined to trust the information there than I am the Chemist & Druggist piece. The 1912 date wouldn't really make a lot of sense... It's always seemed more like it was WWI that disrupted their manufacturing there than a business decision to close the factory, and I can certainly see them trying to hold on through the early years of the war which is more what the information in the court documents seems to suggest.
I would love to get my hands on a copy of the full text, as I've only ever walked through about a page or so of the Snippet View contents. But I suppose I can do a bit more digging that way and see what I can assemble. Thankfully the snippets between the various sources don't all exactly line up so you can use the last lines from one to get the first lines from another.
Sometimes. Follow the link and look at the left-hand side of the screen. There may be an ebook edition available directly from google, but more usually it says "No eBook available". Then there are links for online sellers that might have a copy, followed by "Find in a library". For these particular law reports, all the copies seem to be in UK libraries.
Hmm... there is a copy at Oxford, and the libraries there work with Google Books. I wonder if their scan is available online? I had a quick look at http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/ and could not track it down, but a more determined investigation might succeed.
Thanks Mike, I'm on it......
A year later, I found out that the 1920 law report was for a case called Gillette Safety Razor v. Inland Revenue Commissioners. Inland Revenue collects taxes, like the USA IRS does. There is a summary at http://books.google.com/books?id=wv1CAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA50 starting at the bottom of the page. It is tough reading, but apparently had to do with the UK government trying to tax the profits of the USA company. It sounds like the Gillette company won the case.
A footnote at the bottom of http://books.google.com/books?id=Pz4h9xK4GNkC&pg=PA132 reveals a bit more. Apparently the original 1908 UK subsidiary made Gillette worldwide liable to UK tax. The company "first transferred its UK business to a branch of a US affiliate, and then in 1915 licensed the business to a new company set up by its former UK managing directory".
On the face of it the case itself probably had nothing to do with the reasons for closing Leicester: I tend to think WWI was the primary reason for that. But I would still like to read more of the case. Trolling through the snippet view at http://books.google.com/books?ei=Ze...bAQAAMAAJ&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=gillette is tantalizing, and suggests interesting details about financial arrangements. This was around the time when the USA company reincorporated in Delaware, so assets had to be transferred between the old companies and the new one(s).
A footnote at the bottom of http://books.google.com/books?id=Pz4h9xK4GNkC&pg=PA132 reveals a bit more. Apparently the original 1908 UK subsidiary made Gillette worldwide liable to UK tax. The company "first transferred its UK business to a branch of a US affiliate, and then in 1915 licensed the business to a new company set up by its former UK managing directory".
On the face of it the case itself probably had nothing to do with the reasons for closing Leicester: I tend to think WWI was the primary reason for that. But I would still like to read more of the case. Trolling through the snippet view at http://books.google.com/books?ei=Ze...bAQAAMAAJ&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=gillette is tantalizing, and suggests interesting details about financial arrangements. This was around the time when the USA company reincorporated in Delaware, so assets had to be transferred between the old companies and the new one(s).
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Fascinating discussion and information. Thanks to all of you for being so generous with your time and expertise.
Great links, the third one didnt work for me. This theory is viable, i agree that the war may have been a trigger to close the Leicester plant.
The affiliate making Gillette liable for the taxes is somewhat intriguing though. It seems that gillette was always trying to get around many business legal issues.
I finally pulled some text out of the Gillette v. IRC case, but I am going to post it at http://badgerandblade.com/vb/showthread.php/294023-Gillette-Company-History-Geek-Out instead of here.
Tease. It's not there yet!
