The full development of an art has always required two types of invention. No new thing under the sun ever came full fledged into being, and the pioneers in every art have necessarily left their inventions in sketchy form, the detailed arrangements which made them really practical being filled in by later comers.

The history of markets, prices, speculations, of mercantile ventures to new territory as it is conquered, during any great war, would make fascinating reading, and fill volumes. A chapter of business history during the Civil War could be written from a folder of old letters discovered among the private business papers of Charles W. Wilder, a partner of the firm of Wilder and Estabrook, which later became Estabrook and Eaton.

This month is in a sense an anniversary season for The Business Historical Society, for although it was founded in October, 1925, it was not until the following June that it became an active organization. The field which the Society entered four years ago was almost unknown, and since that time its work in collecting and organizing material, and in enlisting the interest of the community has already given business history a definite place among subjects for scholarly study and research.

New England, early settled within its small slice of territory, has seen its influence spread to the Pacific as a nation's frontier gradually receded westward. Blocked by its barren soil from agricultural expansion and encouraged by proximity to the sea, the section quickly turned to commerce and manufacturing. New England goods handled by New England merchants flowed south and west, and its surplus capital aided in the development of the new areas.

The early business career of motion pictures lies entangled in the correspondence and documents of the firm of Raff & Gammon which have been presented to our organization through the kindness of Terry Ramsaye, Editor-in-Chief of Pathé Exchange, Inc., New York. Lost in the volumes of vituperative letters from impatient dealers and the business negotiations of Raff & Gammon for the sale of monopoly rights for whole states, the business history of the industry awaits a thorough ransacking of the available documents. What is most apparent immediately is the excitement of the public in the new invention and the rush of the more adroit to seize the profits from its immediate exploitation.

Some correspondence, which has come to the Society, of the Mayor of Boston in April, 1851, in regard to the threat of a “tumult, riot, and mob” over a fugitive slave case, recalls the time when slavery was not only a very live issue, but one which split the North into two bitterly hostile camps. For years Boston abolitionists carried on their campaign in the midst of a community hardly more sympathetic with their views than the South itself.

History — and this includes economic history — has thrived on controversy. Is it a science? Is it a scientific method? Is it a mere jumble of uncoördinated facts deadly in a textbook and amusing to a trained antiquarian? Or perhaps its utility is in substantiating our religions like “progress” and the Hegelian “march of reason”?

A Scientific American of 1882 contains an article, with several illustrations, describing the gravity coal piers of the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad, at Hoboken, New Jersey. The enormous traffic in coal carried on at this port, says this author, requires broad, cheap and rapid methods of handling large quantities at once.

“Manila lies between the richest countries in the East and West Indies. One can find here the silver of Peru and New Spain, diamonds from Golconda, topaz, sapphires and cinnamon from Ceylon, pepper from Java, cloves and nutmeg from Molucca, rubies and camphor from Borneo, pearls and costly carpets from Persia, benzoin, rubber and ivories from Camboja, musk from Lequios, silks and cotton goods from Bengal, porcelain and fabrics and other luxuries from China.” So runs an eighteenth-century description of the wealth carried by the yearly treasure ship which sailed between Acapulco, in Mexico, and Manila.

“Here and there in Ohio, Indiana and the Eastern States,” says Alvin F. Harlow in his book, Old Towpaths, “the pedestrian… may sometimes notice the faint indication of an embankment or a shallow depression, weed-grown but stretching away with such regularity of line as to rouse his belief that it may be an artificial work.… If he will inquire in the neighborhood he may find some white-bearded ancient who remembers that these poor ruins are all that is left of what was once a great internal improvement, the pride of the locality and the State — a canal.”

William Dean Howells writes that canals in 1837 were a greater achievement than railroads were in 1897. Before the railroad came, there was an elaborate system of them, built with characteristic American enthusiasm and enterprise, by men who were not professional engineers, many of whom had never seen a canal. The Erie gave New York her start toward becoming the American metropolis, and Pennsylvania had a system of state canals, supplemented by short railroads, which connected Philadelphia with Pittsburgh.

That the tariff conflict of agricultural and manufacturing interests in the United States was not much different a hundred years ago than it is today is exemplified in an acquisition of the Business Historical Society, “A view of the ruinous consequences of a dependence on foreign markets for the sale of the great staples of this nation, Flour, Cotton, and Tobacco.” The author is Matthew Carey, one of the most vociferous protectionists writing after the crash of 1819.

The thought of how short a time we have been modern is brought to mind by remembering that less than a century ago mail stages were running in Massachusetts. The Indian Tavern, Bromfield Street, was the starting point for lines to Newport, New Bedford and Bristol, and until 1840 they furnished the regular mode of conveying mail to those towns and intermediate points. The mail was still carried by private contractors, and the elements of chance and whim on the part of drivers still entered into its delivery, on time and in good order.

The history of one of America's oldest importing houses contained in records for the period from 1798 to 1916 has been presented by Mr. and Mrs. William Henry Trotter of Philadelphia. William Trotter, Quaker, who organized the company in 1789, was an importer of metals, leather goods, textiles and miscellaneous commodities.

Several years ago the Business Historical Society received as a gift a copy of the oldest printed treatise on accountancy written by the Franciscan friar, Lucas Pacioli, and published in Venice in 1494. The system of bookkeeping by double entry which Pacioli described very clearly and accurately, was already in use in northern Italy more than a century and a half before the friar composed his famous treatise.

“Imagine a Yankee Rip van Winkle,” says Samuel Eliot Morison in his Maritime History of Massachusetts, “who had slept out his twenty years within hailing distance of the State House dome. As he looked about him in 1853 the most astonishing sight would be —, not the railroad, not the telegraph, not the steamship — but the clipper ship. During the last half of his sleep there had taken place the greatest revolution in naval architecture since the days of Hawkins and Drake. Below in Boston Harbor, and setting sail for a port whose name he had never heard, were vessels four and five times as large as any he had ever seen, with canvas five and six times the utmost area that the old Boston East-Indiamen dared spread to the lightest air.”

A recent and most interesting gift to the Society comprises two beautifully illustrated volumes of historical material from what is possibly the oldest business enterprise in existence, the famous Swedish copper mine, Stora Kopparberg. The books are a gift from the company. It was established in the decade of the 1280's. A study of the history of this old company, by Dr. Henrietta Larson, will be published in a future issue of the Journal of Economic and Business History.

Two collections of the Lord shipping records preserved in Maine since the colonial era have been presented to Harvard University and the Business Historical Society by Miss Mary Patterson Lord and Charles H. Taylor. Although considerable material on shipping is now contained in Baker Library, many invaluable manuscripts are still in private possession scattered along the Atlantic Coast. It is hoped that the extent and location of these documents will be made known for research in early American water transportation.

The groundwork for a study of American investment trusts is contained in a mass of documents presented to the Business Historical Society by Edgar Higgins, investment trust consultant of New York City.