Word: bladed
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...story should seem familiar: 1984 a year late. But as in so many key movies of the decade (Blade Runner, Diva, the Mad Max films), texture is text here, submerging the plot in a garage sale of 20th century detritus. Brazil is a place, like Stalin's Russia or the British welfare state, where everything is planned but nothing quite works. A Rube Goldberg spy machine kibitzes with a roving bloodshot electronic eye, then wheels away in a deranged gait. Giggling plastic surgeons do their "snip snip slice slice" with metal clamps and Saran Wrap...
...Apparently driven beyond endurance by the paradox of spending his days making razors while sporting a beard of at least 12 inches (descriptions vary), this man had attempted to end the beard at home, with a TRAC II, but was foiled by the slim extension of the blades. In desperation, Nagle says, he came to the Research Room. Again, the TRAC II was tried without success. After consultations, an old-style double-edged Blue Blade razor was brought in for the heavy work. The Blue Blade managed, in Nagle's words "to get through the thick...
Today Gillette is a monstrous international conglomerate with plants from Johannesburg to Munich. The company does over $2 billion dollars of business every year, selling products that range from luxury fountain pens to ladies deodorant. Fully one third of the corporation's business, however, remains in the bedrock blades and razors division: the action end of the shaving process accounts for one third of Gillette's total sales and two thirds of its profit. The company dominates the U.S. shaving market supplying 60 percent of the country's blades and 70 percent of its razors--that's 1.3 billion blade...
...those blades and razors are made in shaving's South Boston World Headquarters. Inside the massive 15-building complex, fields of workers stretch away as far as the eye can see in brightly-lit warehouse-sized rooms. The actual blade manufacturing process is a closely-guarded trade secret. Reporters are allowed only to the periphery of the manufacturing area where workers can be seen throwing prepackaged bags of Good News! and Daisy disposable razors into waiting boxes. Mysterious sharpening noises can be heard from massive box-like machines in the middle distance, but the transformation of blades from hystersitic theory...
...ease of use, and black demerits for cuts and scratches. The responses are recorded, tallied and analyzed by computer and used in the development of new products. Given Gillette's history as a shaving innovator the room may truly be said to be the cradle of the razor and blade as we know them today...