An address delivered by Mr. Joseph H. Appel at the Annual Meeting of the Business Historical Society.

It was two o'clock of a morning in late October, 1899. As night editor I had just put to press Colonel McClure's Philadelphia Times and was examining a first copy. My eye caught John Wanamaker's advertisement—with a banner head across the top—in color. A thought flashed in my mind—why not make it read: “Wanamaker's Daily News”? Make up the page like a newspaper—a newspaper of the store? Why not? Isn't a store a little world? Why not tell its news? I slept on the thought. Next day I wrote a letter—closing with “kindly reply at your earliest convenience.” The reply was prompt. “Come and see me,” signed John Wanamaker. Two days later I said goodbye to the Times and became an advertising writer in a great store.

Through the kindness of Professor Herbert Heaton of the University of Minnesota the editor has learned of a valuable set of business papers recently found in Leeds, England. The Yorkshire Post of March 25, 1938, tells of the discovery of the papers of John Wilson & Sons, of Leeds, which date from the middle of the eighteenth century. This collection, according to the Post, consists of “nearly 200 volumes, comprising day books, cash books, company ledgers, district ledgers, inventories, stock books, warehouse and delivery books, and others of a miscellaneous character.” The papers have been placed in the municipal Reference Library of Leeds.

Through the kindness of Professor Herbert Heaton of the University of Minnesota the editor has learned of a valuable set of business papers recently found in Leeds, England. The Yorkshire Post of March 25, 1938, tells of the discovery of the papers of John Wilson & Sons, of Leeds, which date from the middle of the eighteenth century. This collection, according to the Post, consists of “nearly 200 volumes, comprising day books, cash books, company ledgers, district ledgers, inventories, stock books, warehouse and delivery books, and others of a miscellaneous character.” The papers have been placed in the municipal Reference Library of Leeds.

Colonial America gave little thought to life insurance selling. The colonists secured protection against marine risks from private underwriters, first in London, eventually at home. It has been asserted that Philadelphia had no fire insurance until 1752; Boston none before 1795. The first corporations formed in this country for insuring lives were those of the Presbyterian Ministers Fund (1759) and a similar company organized for the benefit of Episcopal ministers (1769). Neither of these corporations offered insurance to the general public. In the last decade of the eighteenth century many insurance companies were formed in the United States. At least five were chartered to underwrite life risks, but only one, The Insurance Company of North America, appears to have accepted any. There is no basis for saying that any of these early companies tried to sell life insurance.

Have you ever thought of a very peculiar situation in the theorizing by scholars? That little or no provision has been made for action, doing, accomplishing, administration? The one vital flow of effort necessary to progress, even to existence, has not been brought into any of the philosophic systems in the two or three thousand years of effort.

It was at Harvard in the period 1878–1907 that a start was made along a new line. This was the conception and elaboration of a philosophy that provided a place for action, even for business administration.

Few aspects of business show greater change within the past hundred years than does advertising. The reader accustomed to the advertisements of the modern day is immediately struck, when he starts turning the pages of a pre-Civil War paper, by the deadly uniformity and limited appeal of the earlier advertising technique.

An occasional iconoclast among the earlier merchants only serves to accentuate the impression that a departure from the accepted forms of the period made a business man suspect in the eyes of his associates.

The business man has to adapt his business constantly to changing conditions. It must have seemed to the American importer of British goods in the first half of the nineteenth century that there were nothing but changing conditions. Nathan Trotter, of the Philadelphia firm of Nathan Trotter & Co., began doing business as a freight-renting importer of British leathers, woolens, and metal goods in the period before the War of 1812. Those were the days when an importer earned an importer's profit. Supply could not keep pace with demand; shipments came in the spring and in the fall, and payments were correspondingly concentrated. The risk involved, particularly in price changes over so long a time between order and receipt of goods, and the interest on capital invested entitled him to an importer's profit.

Herewith are reproduced a picture and a quotation—two sources of information on the ships of the first great commercial sea-empire known to history. The home of the empire was Phoenicia on the east coast of the Aegean. Its people were Semites. Just off the Great Road of the caravan traffic between Egypt and the fertile lands of the Euphrates, the Phoenicians took to boats instead of camels. At first cautiously paddling in their crude dugouts from headland to headland, they in time built larger and more adequate boats, which enabled them to make the Aegean their market. In time, also, they planted colonies farther west, which became rich and strong long before Rome had risen to strength. The Periplus of Hanno, which tells of exploring down the west coast of Africa with a view to planting a colony, is a great story of adventure. By the sixth century B. C., the commerce of the Phoenicians embraced the far reaches of the known world.

The autobiography of David Augustus Neal, of Salem, in a real sense epitomizes New England's business experience from the 1790's to the Civil War. Not that it is concerned with business only. It is rich in family history, in its picture of education and life in Salem, in travel observations, and in adventure, but it is singularly informative on business.

Very little is known about Collard de Marke, whose account books I examined in the Municipal Archives of Bruges in the summer of 1937, except that he was one of the sixteen money-changers licensed to practice in Bruges during the 1360's. That much is clear from the municipal records in which he is listed among the money-changers who were fined because they had exchanged nobles (a Flemish coin) at an illegal rate. His account books are of great value to the business historian because they show very definitely that the medieval money-changers did not confine themselves to mere exchange transactions and to trade in gold and silver, but that, as early as the middle of the fourteenth century, they had extended their field of activity by going into the banking business. They received money on deposit and made loans to reliable customers.

Mr. John A. Sessions, a student at the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration, has brought to the office of the Society a very interesting collection of manuscript material which concerns the business of Charles Porter Phelps, who early in the nineteenth century was a lawyer and a merchant in Boston.

The present year marks the hundredth anniversary of regular transatlantic steamship service. On April 23, 1838, two commercial steamships arrived in New York from England, one, the Great Western, initiating a regular service. In 1938 the anniversary received only scant notice in the newspapers of New York, but in 1838 the arrival, stay, and departure of the ships, with the attendant festivities and observations, were fully recorded in the press of the day.

One of the most interesting and significant sources, which in the search for material on the history of business is generally tapped in vain, is the diary or autobiography of the American business man. All too often he leaves behind him copious accounts of his travels, his philanthropies, his religious, political and cultural interests, but fails to bequeath to posterity other than fragmentary records of that which is most important of all from the social point of view, his business activities. The successful business man works not only in order to secure a competency which will enable him later to devote himself to his real interests in life, such as art and politics; whether he knows it or not, business is in most cases his real interest and his real talent. How worthwhile it would be, therefore, to read his own accounts of that activity, of his true vocation, which he understands and can interpret for those of later generations as no one else can do.

The student of business history, who is always interested in origins, looks to that land known as the Cradle of Civilization for the beginnings of business. For two generations scholars have been at work seeking archaeological remains of civilization in the Tigris- Euphrates country and deciphering the engravings they have found on stone and on clay tablets. They have uncovered much that is significant, especially concerning religion and government. In recent years they have worked with great interest and success on the economic life of that ancient world. They have found illuminating information about business.

Business in each decade has its own particular troubles, and it is interesting, often amusing, to read of bygone days. Modern communication, banking facilities, transportation, and business methods stand in vivid contrast to those of the early nineteenth century. To men in the East, able to obtain current news, the difficulties caused by the Embargo and Non-Importation acts were a sad worry; but to the merchants in the hinterland, often little more than agents for eastern firms, these regulations were a matter of utmost confusion and concern.