Few people know that the founder of the famous razor blade company, Gillette, had utopian visions to build mega cities. Paul Maliszewski in his article printed in the Cabinet magazine’s 19th issue, explains this vision in detail.

King Camp Gillette, born in 1855, became very rich when he invented the first disposable razor blades. However, he had bigger ideals in mind. He published a book called The Human Drift in 1894, seven years before he founded his razor blade company.

In his book, he pictured a blueprint for a city called Metropolis “located not far from Niagara Falls, where 60 million people lived in 24,000 apartment buildings, each 25 stories tall. In Metropolis, as the city was named, the apartment buildings were arranged in a regular pattern and served as the central hubs or cogs around which life there revolved. Short, neatly landscaped walkways connected the buildings together and led to wider and longer avenues that crisscrossed through the city. Schools, recreation and amusement centers, flower conservatories, parks as ample as they were well-planted, and buildings for food production and storage clustered around every apartment building, each of which accommodated about 2,500 people in comfort and high style. According to the city’s creator, “the most magnificent modern hotel in New York could not compare in beauty of its rooms and liberality of its service with any one of these thousands of buildings of Metropolis.” Indeed, individual apartments promised a lavish, if not obscene 4,500 square feet of living space, which was divided into three bedrooms, three bathrooms, three sitting rooms adjacent to the bedrooms, a library and music room, as well as a window-lined parlor and veranda for entertaining guests. An expansive glass-domed room, located at the center of the apartment buildings, offered a communal dining area. In all, the city encompassed 15,000 miles of avenues, “every foot of which would be a continuous change of beauty.” It extended east into New York State and, pending the cooperation of the Canadian government, west into the province of Ontario. It drew much of its power from the Falls and the Niagara River. The residential portion of the city alone— that tightly woven honeycomb pattern of apartment complexes and ancillary buildings— lay just south of Lake Ontario and subsumed sizable parts of seven upstate New York counties, from Niagara and Erie in the west to Ontario and Wayne in the east.”

According to Gillette, ” In the building of “Metropolis” there would be no excavating for sewage, heating, cold air, and electric systems. Each would be above ground and in plain sight, where every defect could be noted and repairs made without unnecessary labor. To accomplish this, a chamber is formed above ground by the erection of steel pillars and the building of a platform throughout the length and breadth of the city. The pillars used are of such different height as to overcome the inequalities of land surface, and make it possible to lay a perfectly level platform at the top of the pillars, it being calculated to be elevated at least twenty-five feet from the ground. This platform is composed of frameworks of steel inlaid with glass, similar to the numerous vault lights of our cities, which admit light to cellars and basements. We now have a perfectly level floor of glass and steel throughout the city, and the chamber beneath that platform is as light as day.”

Obviously not a single part of Metropolis has ever been realized. However, it is interesting to remember the utopian dreams of visionary entrepreneurs of the New World.