ABSTRACT
THE historical aspects of Advertising will only be discussed here in so far as they derive practical importance from the way in which modern Commercial Advertising is affected by its origins. Advertising had its birth when the first maker of a useful commodity had served all the customers who came to him unsought and used some mode of making known his ability to supply wares to others. Perhaps he was a cave-dweller who allowed to be visible from the entrance of his abode more stone axes than a family of the prehistoric age customarily employed in its pursuit of food. Advertising as a definite business may be more conveniently said to have been born when merchants and manufacturers first began to employ someone else to promote their sales. This definition, at all events, will bring the ancientry of Advertising within manageable limits. Readers desirous of delving deeper into the guilty past may go—if they can find it—to the only history of Advertising in existence, so far as I am aware, the late Henry Sampson's amusing volume of 1874, * now a scarce book. Sampson, afterwards better known as ‘Pendragon’ of the Referee, was not a weighty-writer on the subject, and gives no evidence of knowing —or caring—anything at all about Advertising. The book is in no sense complete. It skips long periods without shame, and dwells at disproportionate length on anything which the author happened to find amusing. He devotes a long chapter of fifty-three pages to Lotteries and Lottery Insurances, and another nearly half as long to Matrimonial Advertisements from 1695 to his own time. Another entire chapter describes in detail an old swindle, Graham's Celestial Bed, and an establishment (over which the future Lady Hamilton presided) known as the Temple of Health. There is little or no indication that the author had ever considered Advertising as a serious business. The history, in fact, is a sad piece of ‘book-making.’ The subject awaits its serious historian.
