Chapter 58: A New Commercial Era
More so than in the First Industrial Revolution, the Second Industrial Revolution saw big changes in consumer markets. Thanks to mail-order catalogs, dry goods palaces, and new department stores, consumers had more options than ever before. Whether it was clothing, furniture, grooming products, cameras, musical instruments, processed food, or bottled soft drinks, people from all backgrounds could buy stuff they didn’t used to have available to them. And with more disposable income, lower prices, and increasingly-creative advertisements targeting them, buy stuff they did.
Sources for this episode include:
“A New American Consumer Culture.” Industrialization and the Rise of Big Business, 1870-1900. US History II (OS Collection). Lumen Learning. https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-ushistory2os2xmaster/chapter/a-new-american-consumer-culture/
Crawford, Brenna. “Techniques and Finishes of 19th Century Furniture.” SFGATE. https://homeguides.sfgate.com/techniques-finishes-19th-century-furniture-103554.html
Critchell, James Tourbridge and Joseph Raymond. A History of the Frozen Meat Trade: An Account of the Development and Present Day Methods of Preparation, Transport, and Marketing of Frozen and Chilled Meats. 2nd Edition. Constable & Co. 1912.
Farrell, T. “Spread the Wealth: A History of Hartley’s Jam.” Let’s Look Again: A History of Branded Britain. 24 Feb 2015. http://letslookagain.com/2015/02/sweet-success-a-history-of-hartleys-jam/
Herreld, Donald J. “An Economic History of the World Since 1400.” The Great Courses. 2016.
Hobsbawm, E.J. The Age of Empire 1875-1914. Vintage Books. 1987.
Johnson, Steve. How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World. Penguin Random House. 2014.
Kastner, Jeffery and Deanna Day. “Bringing the Drugstore Home: An Interview with Deanna Day.” Cabinet Magazine. Issue 60. 2015-2016. https://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/60/kastner_day.php
Koehn, Nancy F. “Consumerism and Consumption.” 19th Century U.S. Newspapers Consumer Database. Gale Digital Collections. https://www.gale.com/binaries/content/assets/gale-us-en/primary-sources/newsvault/gps_newsvault_19thcentury_usnewspapers_consumerism_essay.pdf
Morris, Charles R. The Tycoons: How Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, and J.P. Morgan Invented the American Supereconomy. Henry Holt and Co. 2005.
NW Ayer & Sons, incorporated Advertising Agency Records, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, https://www.si.edu/object/archives/sova-nmah-ac-0059?destination=object/archives/components/sova-nmah-ac-0059-ref8405#:~:text=In%201876%2C%20NW%20Ayer%20%26%20Son,the%20industry's%20first%20art%20department
Pond's extract company - Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University. http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/eaa/ponds/P00/P0041-72dpi.jpeg
“Stewart and the Development of the Department Store, 1823-1876.” The Business History Review, vol. 39, no. 3, [President and Fellows of Harvard College, Cambridge University Press], 1965, pp. 301–22, https://doi.org/10.2307/3112143.
Ridner, Judith. “The Dirty History of Soap.” The Conversation. 12 May 2020. https://theconversation.com/the-dirty-history-of-soap-136434
“Sir Thomas Lipton.” Intriguing History. 15 Apr 2019. https://intriguing-history.com/sir-thomas-lipton/
Thoreau, Henry David. Walden; or, Life in the Woods. Ticknor and Fields. 1854.
Zola, Émile. The Ladies’ Paradise: A Realistic Novel. Trans. by Ernest Alfred Vizetelly. Vizetelly & Co. 1886.
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Full Transcript
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During the Second Industrial Revolution, few literary figures made a bigger impact than French writer Émile Zola. Born in Paris in 1840, he grew up in Provence before returning to the French capital at age 18. He worked a few jobs as a clerk into his early 20s before he began seriously writing.
And then he pretty much couldn’t stop writing. Whether it was novels, short stories, plays, essays – whatever – Zola churned out published work after published work until his untimely death in 1902. All in all, he encapsulated the spirit of the Third Republic.
Roughly half his novels – twenty, to be precise – were part of an expansive series known as Les Rougon-Macquart: Natural and Social History of a Family Under the Second Empire. It loosely follows two branches of a family – one branch from a legitimate birth, the other from an illegitimate birth – over several generations during the reign of Napoleon III. Influenced by Charles Darwin’s ideas of heredity and environment (shout out Chapter 55!), Zola’s characters were developed in conjunction with an extraordinary age of imperial wars, Barron Hausmann’s remaking of Paris (shout out Chapter 51!), and, finally, Prussian invasion (shout out Chapter 53!).
Among the novels is Au Bonheur des Dames, or “The Ladies Paradise.” Published in 1883, it follows a young woman named Denise Baudu, who arrives in Paris from Normandy in the 1860s and gets herself a job in a new department store.
“Denise was absorbed by the display at the principal entrance. There she saw, in the open street, on the very pavement, a mountain of cheap goods—bargains, placed there to tempt the passers-by, and attract attention. Hanging from above were pieces of woollen and cloth goods, merinoes, cheviots, and tweeds, floating like flags; the neutral, slate, navy-blue, and olive-green tints being relieved by the large white price-tickets. Close by, round the doorway, were hanging strips of fur, narrow bands for dress trimmings, fine Siberian squirrel-skin, spotless snowy swansdown, rabbit-skin imitation ermine and imitation sable. Below, on shelves and on tables, amidst a pile of remnants, appeared an immense quantity of hosiery almost given away; knitted woollen gloves, neckerchiefs, women's hoods, waistcoats, a winter show in all colours, striped, dyed, and variegated, with here and there a flaming patch of red. Denise saw some tartan at nine sous, some strips of American vison at a franc, and some mittens at five sous. There appeared to be an immense clearance sale going on; the establishment seemed bursting with goods, blocking up the pavement with the surplus.”
“The Ladies Paradise” goes on to depict the store’s operations, the lives of the store's clerks, and the jockeying between them. What’s most significant about it is the way Zola portrays the modern woman as lively and independent.
But what’s most significant about this book, in the context of our story today, is the novelty of the setting. By 1883, department stores were starting to multiply across the industrializing world. They were extraordinary in their scale and scope. They were new, and extravagant, and really only found in big cities. So, for Zola’s readers outside such metropoles, reading about such a store would have been truly eye-opening.
Now, if you remember back to Chapter 45 – when I talked about fashion in the First industrial Revolution – there were a handful of department stores throughout the world going back to the 18th Century, but they were slow to spread. Yet, by the mid-19th Century, as railroads were bringing more and more travelers into the big cities, the department store concept really started taking off.
In 1849, in preparation for the Great Exhibition coming to London a couple years later, one Charles Henry Harrod moved his little grocery shop out of the East End and onto Brompton Road in Knightsbridge, just south of Hyde Park. Over the next 30 years, he and his son massively expanded the business. After a fire destroyed it in late 1883, they rebuilt with the massive, Victorian building we know as Harrods today.
In the United States, many of the old dry goods stores were being converted into modern department stores. Among them was Alexander Turney Stewart’s so-called “Marble Palace” (later the “Cast Iron Palace”) on Broadway in New York City. A few years later, one Rowland Hussey Macy started his own such Manhattan store – as did Joseph and Lyman Bloomingdale, as did Samuel Lord and George Washington Taylor, did Frank Winfield Woolworth.
In Philadelphia, John Wanamaker converted a railroad station into what he called his “Grand Depot” – the “largest space in the world devoted to retail selling on a single flood.” Wanamaker actually coined the term “department store.” Up in Boston, rivals Jordan Marsh and William Filene turned Washington Street into a major shopping district with their competing department stores. William’s son, Edward, not only came up with major retail innovations, he also came up with the first really good explanation of what a department store was: a single holding company for the many and diverse retail departments under its umbrella. Detroit had Hudson’s. San Francisco had the Emporium. Indianapolis and Milwaukee had Gimbels. And in Chicago, Marshall Field & Company built a spectacular 12-story building, with massive windows and detailed stonework, as well as a reputation for pampering their customers.
But the department store capital of the world was definitely Paris – home to Printemps, Galaries Lafayette, La Samaritaine, Le BHV Marais, and most famous of all, Le Bon Marché.
Le Bon Marché had started as a novelty shop, selling things like ribbons, umbrellas, buttons, and so on. Then, as the 1848 Revolution swept town, the owner met an ambitious salesman.
Aristide Boucicaut was born in the Norman commune of Bellême in 1810. His father owned a small shop that sold women’s clothing. After working for a time as a street vendor, Boucicaut moved to Paris in 1834 and took a job in a shop similar to his family’s. There he sold women’s clothing and accessories. By 1852, he had bought out Le Bon Marché and started putting new ideas into practice.
Among other things, Boucicaut introduced fixed prices at Le Bon Marché. Now, this was a bit unusual. Folks were used to negotiating prices with their local shopkeepers. But in a large store in a large city where it was easy to get around, people didn’t personally know each other anymore. Haggling took on an air of distrust. So, this wouldn’t be an issue at Le Bon Marché. The price was the price, and it made retail sales a lot more efficient.
Additionally, some of these prices would be marked down, either as part of a seasonal sale or seemingly just because. Of course, such bargain prices were part of a clever strategy. Inventory absolutely had to keep rotating. New styles had to come in. So, if something wasn’t selling, they would keep marking down the price – even to the point where they’d be selling at a loss.
And to build trust in the store, the store demonstrated trust in its customers. Anybody could walk in, move around the departments, and feel the clothing for themselves. If they purchased an item and decided they didn’t like it, they could come back and return it to the store – an incredible allowance for that time, which encouraged customers to take a chance on adventurous styles, knowing they could always get their money back if need be.
Thus, a frugal, middle-class woman would be drawn into the elegant store where she would be treated like royalty as she admired a 75-franc shawl, even though she would only end up buying a 5-sous garment. But that was exactly the dynamic the store owners were going for – because a sale is a sale.
And between the newspaper ads and elaborate displays, Le Bon Marché created a tremendous buzz, driving in customers and creating lots and lots of sales. By 1880, the store was half a million square feet with some 2,000 employees. It was the inspiration for “The Ladies Paradise” and set the example for department stores up to the present day.
And just like massive factories had upended life for small-scale manufactures, these massive stores were upending life for small-scale shopkeepers, as were mail-order catalogs (shout out Chapter 57!). Mom and Pop stores bemoaned the advance of such competitors for well over a century – heck, I can think of a few 1990s rom-coms with this premise.
But the fact was that mass production created the conditions for mass consumption. And mass consumption was changing day-to-day life like never before.
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This is the Industrial Revolutions
Chapter 58: A New Commercial Era
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Even as the First Industrial Revolution saw more and more factories scaling the production of goods like fabrics, firearms, dishware, iron, rope, beer, etc., most people were still buying most of their goods directly from small-scale producers or producing it themselves as part of their household chores. Need new shoes? Go to the nearby cobbler. Need a new dining table? Go to the nearby carpenter. Need some soap or some jam? Go buy the ingredients and make it yourself.
But in the last 30 years of the 19th Century, that all massively changed. More and more, people were buying goods made in factories from large-scale distributors like department stores, mail-order catalogues, and dry goods palaces.
It was an age of significant upward mobility, rising wages, and declining birth rates. So, the boom of consumerism was helped along by higher levels of disposable income, but also by falling prices, thanks to the increased use of mass-production techniques.
I can’t possibly list every example of the new consumer goods coming on the market, nor can I give you the detailed histories behind them, including the biographies of all their inventors / promoters. But I’ll try to give you a pretty good overview of the profound reshaping of the commercial landscape.
As always, it seems, we begin with textile goods. Cheaper clothing was becoming more widely acceptable, thanks in part to devices like the sewing machine, which made items like ready-made shirts at scale. The sewing machine, along with the shoe-fasting lathe, also made mass shoe production possible, significantly lowering the cost of footwear. And production of fashion accessories was also being scaled, such as in the case of pocket watches, which we talked about last time.
Then there were home furnishings. Technologies like steam-powered lathes, rotary saws, and other machines allowed furniture makers to more efficiently create everything from tables and chairs to bedframes, sofas, roll-top desks, cabinets, dressers, chests, cupboards, you name it. The wood would be covered in lacquer and/or beeswax to keep it glossy and durable. Many came with ornate decorations like flowery upholstery or mother-of-pearl mosaics. And for those customers who wanted the style but maybe didn’t have the means for something fancy, new wood graining techniques were allowing for faux finishes that made basic woods look more like luxurious mahogany.
Beyond these types of furniture, there were all sorts of home decorations. Clocks, wallpaper, and kerosene lamps are among the items I’ve mentioned here and there in the past. But of all the things people were buying for their homes, the most important, I think, was mirrors.
Now, like a lot of these things we’re talking about today, mirrors had been around for a long time – since antiquity. Going into the 18th Century, Baroque-style framed mirrors were a common feature in stately homes. But, also like a lot of these things today, the production of mirrors became a lot easier in the Industrial Age. In 1835, German scientist Justus von Liebig invented the process of silvering, where a thin layer of silver or aluminum would be sprayed onto the back of a sheet of glass. And as sheet glass making was industrialized in the same decade by the Chance Brothers (Shout out Chapter 46!), the mass production of mirrors became more feasible.
As a result, by the late 19th Century, mirrors were found not only in the homes of the super-wealthy, but in middle-class and even working-class homes too.
But why was the mirror so important? Well, for starters, many psychologists credit its widespread adoption during these years for a social transformation. With the mirror came a heightened sense of individualism. This is important for all sorts of reasons, of course, as the modern primacy of the individual over the family and the community is unlike any other paradigm in history. But for our story today, the reason it was so important was because of the importance the individual began placing on their personal appearance.
Prior to this point, the use of cosmetics had steeply declined since their heyday a century earlier. (Think the court of Versailles in the 1770s.) By the mid-19th Century, it was considered uncouth to wear too much makeup or lipstick – that’s what prostitutes did, not respectable ladies – while men came to see wearing any such cosmetics as effeminate. And, in fact, this Victorian mindset continued into the early 20th Century – Queen Victoria, herself, actually declared makeup to be vulgar. But, with the spread of mirrors, this mindset was gradually chipped away.
In 1866, zinc oxide was discovered to be a good base for face-powder. Not only was it safe and color-holding, but inexpensive. In the 1880s, French perfume company Guerlain expanded into selling lipstick – a product that had long been made at home and applied sparingly. In the 1890s, the Sears Catalog began selling lipstick and rouge. And by the 1920s, not only was lipstick being sold in, well, sticks, but purchasing mass-produced foundation, rouge, dark eyeliner, and various hair products had become considered perfectly normal – indeed, quite essential.
Grooming products also became essential with the spread of mirrors. In 1873, the New York-based Colgate & Company began mass-producing jarred toothpaste – a breakthrough in oral health care. Toothpaste and toothbrushes soon proliferated. In 1879, a St. Louis-based doctor named Joseph Lawrence developed an alcohol-based solution that could be mass-produced as an oral antiseptic. Named after British scientist Joseph Lister – who was making major breakthroughs in germ theory around this time – this “Listerine” became widely adopted by dentists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
In 1901, King Camp Gillette patented his safety razor and began mass-producing it in Boston. Thanks to cheap, disposable blades, men could shave at home without the need of a barber. Helped along by advancements in steelmaking (which we’ll talk more about next time) Gillette was selling tens of millions of units per year by the end of the Second Industrial Revolution. Hair product was also being bought in huge quantities by men and women alike.
But no grooming product became more important during these years than soap.
In 1879, a worker at the Procter & Gamble factory in Cincinnati accidently left a soap churn on too long. But when the company realized the white soap he produced floated in water, they saw a major opportunity. Calling it “Ivory soap” and spending $11,000 on an advertising campaign to promote it (about $320-grand today) they rapidly built a national brand for themselves. Over the next 10 years, they created a product line of more than 30 new soaps and had quadrupled their profits.
Up until now, most people either made their own soap or they bought it from their local pharmacist who made it. But by 1900, most people purchased soap from big producers like Procter & Gamble, or Colgate, or B.J. Johnson in the U.S.; Pears or Lever in the U.K.
Helping along this trend of personal hygiene was the modernization of the bathroom – or “restroom” or “water-closet” or “toilet” or “loo” as you might call it – namely, the increased use of running water and the hooking up of these indoor sanitation facilities to modern sewers. But we’ll be talking more about such topics in the future. Increasingly, a new mirror-covered box was put over the sink in said bathrooms. These new medicine cabinets could store, among other things, the first medicine you could take for seemingly any pain – aspirin, invented in 1899.
It wasn’t just the mirror that made people think more about their personal appearance – it was also the spread of photography. In 1888, New York’s George Eastman began selling his inexpensive Kodak cameras to the general public. He did so by employing the so-called razor-and-blades business model – often credited to King Gillette – in which the basic good (like a razor or a camera) is sold at a low price in order to sell lots of complementary goods (like blades or film). For the first time, the breakthrough of photography was made accessible to the masses, rather than just professional photographers.
Sewing machines – which we’ve talked about in the past – were similarly used by professionals, but were purchased for home use as well.
Consumerism also changed the course of musical history. While the elites were able to enjoy instrumental music devised by clever composers going back centuries, most ordinary people made music with just one simple instrument – their own voice. But as production techniques improved and distribution became cheaper, musical instruments became more accessible to the masses. Pianos, fiddles, and – perhaps most importantly – guitars were more and more being purchased by rich and poor alike. This was critical for how popular music developed – as new recording technologies were being invented right around the same time.
Perhaps most novel were roller skates and bicycles. While both inventions had been around for about a century, important design modifications were made to both in the mid-1800s, leading to a big boom in sales. One James Plimpton from Massachusetts invented a four-wheeled “rocking skate” in 1863, driving the global “rinkomonia” fad of the late 19th Century. In Britain, meanwhile, a team of inventors created new “safety bicycles” by adding a chain drive in the 1870s. Then, when Scots-Irish inventor John Boyd Dunlop made the first practical pneumatic rubber tires in 1888, it kickstarted a worldwide bicycle craze.
But of all the consumer goods that were transformed during this period, none were more important than all the new packaged foods and beverages coming on the market.
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“…for sixteen days I saw from my window a hundred men at work like busy husbandmen, with teams and horses and apparently all the implements of farming...Thus it appears that the sweltering inhabitants of Charleston and New Orleans, of Madras and Bombay and Calcutta, drink at my well...the pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges. With favoring winds it is wafted past the site of the fabulous islands of Atlantis and the Hesperides, makes the periplus of Hanno, and, floating by Ternate and Tidore and the mouth of the Persian Gulf, melts in the tropic gales of the Indian seas, and is landed in ports of which Alexander only heard the names.”
Those are the 1846 words of the transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau, written for his masterpiece, Walden. (Shout out Chapter 44!) The men and horses he was watching from his window were the ice famers of Walden Pond. They were cutting out the winter ice from the large pond to ship to places like the southern U.S., the Caribbean, and India.
This operation was the brainchild of one Frederick Tudor, who made a name for himself as “The Ice King.” He figured out ways to cut large blocks of ice and transport them, encased in sawdust, to warm climates, where they could be stored underground. Yes, they melted a bit, sure, but they managed to retain enough cold that ice chips could be used to chill a cocktail or make ice cream on a tropical beach.
It soon became evident that shipping ice was a good way to preserve food as well. We talked a bit about this last time with the refrigerated rail cars, of course, but it was also happening outside the United States and outside of rail transport.
In 1861, Thomas Sutcliffe Mort established what is considered the world's first “freezing works” at Darling Harbour in Sydney, Australia. Over the next 40 years, several merchants in Australia and New Zealand developed innovative ways to transport frozen meat back to the British Isles.
Even more important than transporting ice was creating it from scratch.
It began in 1842, when a bad hurricane season shipwrecked some of Frederick Tudor’s ice cargoes. Among those who needed the ice was a Florida doctor named John Gorrie. He had discovered a way to treat malaria patients by suspending blocks of ice from the hospital ceiling above them, reducing their fevers. So, with his ice shipments gone, he took to building an ice-making machine in his spare time. Using a pump to compress air, he created heat energy, and then sent it through pipes cooled in water. By extracting heat through the air compression, he could cool the air around him. And it could get cold enough that it would freeze water. Not long after, a French engineer named Ferdinand Carré built a similar such machine.
And as the Confederate States of America faced a blockade during the U.S. Civil War, and ice shipments from New England were cut off, somebody managed to smuggle in some of those Carré ice machines. Over the next ten years, tinkerers in the south built their own such appliances. And as the South came out of the Civil War, they started mass producing ice for the first time, using these early devices of artificial refrigeration.
Simply put, artificial refrigeration would be one of the most important breakthroughs of the industrial revolutions. The ability to preserve food by keeping it cold, even in warm environments, gave the world a stunning boost in food security.
Also boosting food security in these years was the industrialization of agriculture.
These were the years when the Homestead Act encouraged Americans to move west and settle small, family farms. But these were also the years of railroad expansion in the west, and not all of those railroads did too well. Among them was the Northern Pacific, which went into default following the Panic of 1873. To settle with their shareholders and creditors, the railroad gave up some 93 million acres in land granted to them by the federal government in the years leading up to the crash. And so, eastern capitalists suddenly found themselves owning vast tracks of the prairies of the upper Midwest.
To make the most of these newly acquired assets, they sent seasoned managers – overseeing seasonal laborers – to introduce a factory-like system to these so-called “Bonanza” farms. Using new machinery, they mass-planted and mass-harvested wheat and corn. The age of the capitalist-owned factory farm had begun, and grain exchanges became the hottest commodity markets and some of the most lavishly ornamented buildings to be found in middle America.
To keep up with the changing landscape, smaller-scale farmers banded together to purchase supplies, invest in marketing, and pool processing systems. This was especially true among dairy farmers across the world. By the end of the 19th Century, there were about 1,600 dairy co-operatives in the U.S. – especially in the part of the country where I grew up. France had over 2,000 similar “syndicates”. The dairy industry in New Zealand had become dominated by the co-op movement. In Denmark, co-ops were big in the bacon-curing trade. And in Germany, over half the independent farmers had joined rural credit unions for the collective capitalization of their operations.
These developments, along with the developments in the meat industry we talked about last time, had the effect of massively increasing the food supply.
To preserve all this surplus food, the early ice machines wouldn’t be enough. So, entrepreneurs adopted other innovations as well.
Way back in 1795, the Society of the Encouragement of Industry in Revolutionary France offered a 12,000-franc prize to whoever could come up with a way to get food to the front lines in the war against the rest of Europe. A young chef named Nicolas Appert won by packing food in champagne bottles and, with a mix of cheese and lime, sealing them airtight. By the time Napoleon was making himself emperor of the country a decade later, Appert had set up a new laboratory and factory for the process. He published the details of his work, and the concept spread.
Across the English Channel, one Peter Durand began using this concept, but with tinplated cans instead. In this case, the can was sealed with the food inside, then put in cold water and brought to a boil. The lid was slightly opened and then resealed. He sold the concept to a businessman named Bryan Donkin who figured out how to scale the process and, by 1810, was rolling out canned beef to supply the Royal Admiralty for the war against Napoleon.
Food canning was a revolutionary concept, although it would be years before anyone understood the microbiological reasons for why it worked. The practice continued to spread. And, when can making was mechanized in the 1860s, canned food boomed. In 1869, a New Jersey fruit merchant named Joseph Campbell began canning soups, as well as various vegetables, condiments, jellies, and more. Soon after, the Scottish-born John Lawson Johnston began canning beef for the French army during the Fraco-Prussian war under the brand name “Borvil”. And Gail Borden Jr.’s company introduced a number of canned milk products – including condensed milk, processed milk, and evaporated milk – throughout the second half of the 19th Century.
What’s remarkable about this is that, increasingly, these products were bought not because of food scarcity or transport issues, but simply out of convenience. Albeit, to many, idea of canning stuff like soup seemed absurd at the time, like “Really, you can’t make your own soup? You need to buy it at the store in a can?”
Same went for plenty of jarred items, like pickles and jams. In fact, after the U.K. dropped a sugar import tax in 1874, one William Pickles Hartley sold his grocery store and built a jam factory outside Liverpool. Within a decade, he employed over 150 workers who sorted berries and whatnot, churning out about 1,800 tons of jam per year. Inspired by our old friend, Sir Titus Salt, he then built a model workers’ village at an even newer factory, which could soon produce over 100 tons of jam per day. And when pre-made jam is that cheap and that convenient, well, who cared that it was loaded with sugar as its preservative? If anything, that only made it tastier. By the end of the century, his company supplied grocers all over the world with some 1.3 million jars per week.
Other food processers took advantage of the booming grain harvests coming out of the upper American Midwest. Among them was Minneapolis-based Pillsbury, which used new grain elevators to mill thousands – soon tens of thousands – of pounds of flour per day. Then there was the National Biscuit Company, a merger of three companies that each controlled several bakeries across the U.S. Today it’s known by its shortened name, Nabisco. Then there were the brothers from Battle Creek, Michigan, John Harvey and William Keith Kellogg. As Seventh Day Adventists, they practiced a strict vegetarian diet and became nutrition researchers. Experimenting with various grains, they invented granola and corn flakes, creating a new breakfast cereal industry under the Kellogg’s brand.
But probably the most significant of these companies was a pickling and condiment manufacturing business outside of Pittsburg, Pennsylvania.
Henry John Heinz was born there to German immigrant parents in 1844. He began a business making horseradish and various pickled vegetables in 1869, but it failed in the wake of the Panic of 1873. But he soon started over with his cousin, Frederick, and gradually built an empire. By 1896, he created a new tagline: “57 Varieties” – meaning there were 57 different Heinz products to choose from. Except, by that point, they were making more than 57 varieties. (Heinz apparently thought the number was good luck.) In addition to horseradish and pickles, they were producing mustard, tomato soup, relish, celery salad, etc. etc., but the most significant items were definitely baked beans, vinegar, and ketchup.
Again, all of these varieties were either dishes or condiments that used to be made by local farmers or at home. But the H.J. Heinz Company insisted that the factory settings of their operations were more sanitary than the average kitchen. Not only did they get this idea across in their aggressive marketing strategies – which we’ll talk more about later – but also in their political lobbying. The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 was passed in part because Heinz’s lobbyists convinced the federal government that food safety should be more heavily regulated. This way, local, non-industrial food producers who couldn’t match the sanitary but capital-intensive operations Heinz used would be forced out of the market. Scientific researchers would back this up by writing reports for companies like Heinz about how certain food products were safer than others – in fact, an entire nutritional science industry grew around this purpose – and then those companies could point to said reports in the news media.
Mass-produced beverages were also hitting the shelves of grocery stores across the U.K. and U.S. Brewers, including the German-American beer barons we talked about in Chapter 54, were coming up with increasingly sophisticated means of mass-producing ales and lagers.
Soft drink producers were too. I mentioned Schwepps soda water, for example, back in Chapter 51. In 1886, a druggist in Atlanta, Georgia, started making his own carbonated beverage to appeal to the Temperance Movement. Using the caffeine-rich African kola nut and coca leaves to both flavor it and give the drinker a bolt of energy – and yes, because of the coca leaves, cocaine was one of the early ingredients – John Pemberton gave the world Coca-Cola.
While such carbonated drinks were originally sold from soda fountains, mass bottling such beverages was soon made possible thanks to a pair of inventions. The first was William Painter’s 1892 Crown Cork Bottle Seal. The second was the Libby Glass Company’s 1899 bottle-blowing machine, invented by then-employee Michael Owens. By the end of the Technological Revolution, bottled soft drinks were becoming common in grocery stores.
And grocery stores themselves went through a transformation during these years.
Before he started mass producing tea in what is now Sri Lanka and shipping it across the globe, the ever-fascinating Sir Thomas Lipton built an empire of grocery stores across the U.K. Starting with his impoverished family’s shop in Glasgow in 1870, Lipton stayed open for long hours, experimented with how he displayed his inventory to maximize sales, and – most importantly – sold a wide range of goods. By 1898, Lipton’s Markets had 245 locations.
Mass-distribution allowed such grocery store empires to flourish in the U.S. as well, including A&P and Kroger’s, founded in 1859 and 1883 respectively.
And who was ready to make all this mass-distribution possible? That’s right: The advertising industry.
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By 1904, the National Biscuit Company was using the “Nabisco” brand name to market its products to a broad consumer base in the U.S. That year, they put out a magazine ad, featuring a fashionable young lady, covered in fine fabrics and flowers, with a box labeled “Nabisco”.
The ad read:
“Like a Sweet Memory from the luxurious courts of old come Nabisco Sugar Wafers – the most exquisite confection that ever graced My Lady’s Table or crowned the banquet of a King. A medley of flavors in Lemon, Orange, Chocolate, Vanilla and Mint. Harmonizing perfectly with Viand and Vintage, Punch, Sherbet and Fruit.”
The message was clear: Middle-class Americans could experience the delicacies that were previously accessible only to royalty – at least if they bought some processed food from Nabisco. It was typical of the marketing strategies of the time. And this ad was the product of the advertising industry’s most innovative firm.
Francis Ayer was born in the Berkshires of Massachusetts in 1848. His mother died when he was only three and his father, Nathaniel Wheeler Ayer, raised him in western New York. Like his father, Francis became a schoolteacher, but unlike his father, he didn’t take much of a liking to it. So, he moved down to Philadelphia where he was hired by a newspaper as an advertising solicitor.
By 1867, though, Ayer realized there was money to be made by doing the advertising work independently. He established his own business, naming it in his father’s honor: N.W. Ayer & Son.
It wasn’t the only ad agency in the U.S. at the time, but it was an ad agency that withstood the Panic of 1873 better than others. In 1877, they acquired the firm that previously belonged to our old friend, Volney B. Palmer. (Or, more accurately, they bought out the firm that bought out the firm that was started by the guy who inherited Palmer’s business when Palmer died.) By 1886, Ayer explained the philosophy of his firm: “to make advertising pay the advertiser, to spend the advertiser’s money as it were our own, to develop, magnify and dignify advertising as a business.”
If you remember back to Chapter 38, when we talked about the early years of the advertising industry, you’ll recall that the ad men of the time had a bad reputation. They would help a company place an ad in a newspaper, take a big commission from that newspaper, but not provide much in the way of transparency. So, they promoted a lot of shady products and had a tendency to grift the customer or the newspaper in the process.
Ayer wanted to change all that. And, in the process, he made three big changes in the way advertising was done.
In 1876, he signed a new kind of contract with Diggee & Conard, an agricultural supply company in Philly. Under the terms of this “open contract”, Ayer would provide access to the rates the newspapers charged and Diggee & Conard would pay Ayer a fixed commission based on the volume of ads placed. This model would revolutionize the advertising industry, as it aligned the interests of both the ad agency and its clients. By 1884, almost three out of four of Ayer’s billings were done on an open contract basis.
Then, in 1888, he took it a step further. Ayer hired one Jarvis Wood as a full-time copywriter for the firm. For the first time, the ad agency would take the lead in creating not only the marketing strategy, but the words used in the campaign. By 1900, they had an entire Copy Department.
The third big innovation was made in 1898, when Ayer hired a full-time artist to assist the design of the ads. By 1910, they had an Art Department to complement the Copy Department.
There are a lot of interesting developments we often overlook when we think about the consequences of the Second Industrial Revolution. Among them is the explosion of creative advertising during that period. From 1870 to 1914, billboards became common around the world. Newspapers and magazines increasingly allowed agencies to place full-page ads. Manufacturers began advertising their goods directly to consumers – even though those consumers were buying their products through distributors like grocers and department stores, rather than directly from the factory.
To help their clients sell all the surpluses of mass-production and distribution, the ad agencies needed to convince consumers that (A) They needed the product in the ad; (B) It was a good product – better, perhaps, than similar products out there; and (C) This was a popular product among their socio-economic group. I cannot express how huge class-based market segmentation was to convince people that, even if they didn’t have great wealth or standing, they were still the right kind of people to buy the goods being promoted.
The point is, this wasn’t about meeting existing demand in the market – this was about creating new demand in the market. Like, “We’ve got to get people to stop thinking that only rich people buy soap! Poor people can afford to buy soap – they don’t need to make it themselves!” And, for what it’s worth, its amazing how much time we save buying pre-made goods – it’s time we can use to do other productive (perhaps even income-generating) activities. Division of labor means that most of us have lost the skills to, say, make our own ketchup. But, thanks to the advertisers who convinced us to just go buy some darn ketchup, the world as a whole now has a lot more ketchup. And a lot more everything else too.
To make it happen, ad agencies developed some interesting strategies. Throughout the Technological Revolution, the phrase “new and improved” became used for countless newer models of the same goods made by the same manufacturers. Then there was the phrase, “dollar down, dollar a week”, since buying on credit became a critical way to convince consumers to invest in the goods being pushed.
Because many of these consumer goods were so new, many ads had to include instructions for how one would use them. Today, I see this with various cloud-based tech companies with new products for project management, digital outreach, etc. Back then, though, this strategy was commonly used for those new grooming products. The Pond Extract Company’s Vanishing Cream, for example (essentially a moisturizer) came with detailed instructions for how to apply it to the body after a bath.
Other agencies had to focus on the quality of their clients’ products to convince consumers of their merit.
In 1911, a travelling salesman for Heinz realized he couldn’t seem to convince Wisconsin retailers to carry his company’s vinegar. Most of these grocers got the vinegar they stocked from nearby farms – thereby supporting the local family farmers who made it as their side-gig. Then the salesman came up with an idea. He went door-to-door, meeting the customers of these stores directly, telling them about the sanitary conditions of the Heinz factory and challenging them to taste tests of Heinz vinegar versus locally-made vinegar. Apparently, dozens of Wisconsin women complained to their grocers until finally the stores started placing orders with the salesman.
Heinz advertising mirrored this approach. They argued that the Heinz-made vinegar, horseradish, ketchup, etc. was simply better than the stuff getting made at home or by small-scale distributors. Close to home did not mean high in quality.
In a lot of ways, advertising brought home the changes of industrialization more than most other facets of life. The consumer goods being hocked illustrated the modern economy to the average person more than almost anything – save for, perhaps, railroads or printed materials. But that’s going to change. Because before the Second Industrial Revolution was over, there would be big suspension bridges, skyscrapers, trucks, airplanes, and more. And making these things possible were two commodities in particular: Steel and Rubber – next time on the Industrial Revolutions!
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