Alfred Carl Fuller was reared on a farm, which he left in 1903, bound for Boston. With only $75 in his pocket, the unemployed 18-year-old moved in with his sister and her husband. He got a job as a trolley conductor, but his employer was somewhat displeased when Fuller took a trolley for a joy ride.

He was fired from a host of other jobs, including gardening and grooming horses. His own brother-in-law dismissed him from a job as a delivery boy because he kept delivering packages to the wrong addresses.

Finally, just before his 20th birthday, Fuller went to a former business partner of his late brother. They had sold brushes door to door, and Fuller thought he could take over the trade. As he went door to door, he discovered that many potential customers wanted custom-made brushes.

In 1906, he built a workshop in his sister's basement to make such brushes. He earned enough with these brushes to move out of his sister's home to his own place in Hartford, Connecticut. There he opened the Capital Brush Company, which he later renamed Fuller Brush.

Within a few years, Fuller's salesmen were all over the country. In 1922, The Saturday Evening Post labeled them Fuller Brush men.