These have come down to us and are preserved in the British museums along with the old coins and stamped bits of metal. But the printers of those bits of paper had as little conception of what advertising was to become as the stampers of those bits of silver had of today's banking and clearing house operations. Or—to return to the parallel of steam—they had as little understanding of the possibilities of advertising as a propulsive power in business as had Watt that his crude pumping machine of 1781—his "sun-and-planet" wheel—would develop the manufactures of a hundred years later. Up to that time—if advertising depends for its industrial basis upon the power of the printing press to duplicate advertisements and the ability of the public to read—it might be said that the crudity of the press and the lack of literacy had held back advertising.
But after that time for half a century the press was efficient enough and the people literate enough to have developed far more in advertising—if the efficiency of advertising rests in a positive way upon the press and literacy. But for over half a century advertising still failed to develop as we know it. I dwell on this and repeat it, because in examining the basis for the present industrial efficiency in advertising I have found everywhere I have examined that writers have ascribed it primarily to the perfection of the
