Page:The Science of Advertising (1910).djvu/29

Rh carried on; third, the greatly lengthening distances over which it became necessary to transact them.

'''These three dominating factors revolutionized the old ways of production and distribution. They followed the substitution of steam for hand power in industry, which brought about a general condition of specialized production which turned out so great a surplus of manufactured goods that, to dispose of them, both the speed of selling had to be suddenly accelerated and the area of distribution greatly increased.'''

'''Coincidentally came further progress in printing and a great increase in literate population. But advertising, as an industry, depends more directly upon the capacity of power production for turning out great surpluses of perfected and specialized products and upon the potential ability of the general public to consume them. But on the economic side, the power-printing press came only in time to solve the harder problem.'''

An old man, whose memory went back well before the days of universal power-machine production summed up this problem to me not long ago. He was not the sort of old man who looked back and considered his time better than ours because his problems were simpler. Just the opposite.

"The difficulty of a problem confronting a