Advertising history

Looking more at old ads in the Duke archives, these excerpts give me a sense of advertising’s winding path of invention:

1841 – Volney B. Palmer opens the first American advertising agency, in Philadelphia.
1850 – Advertising in the New York Tribune doubles between October 1849 and October 1850.
1856 – Mathew Brady advertises his services of “photographs, ambrotypes and daguerreotypes” in the New York Herald paper. His inventive use of type in the ad goes against the newspaper industry standard of all-agate and all same-size type used for advertisements in the papers.
1861 – The first Sunday edition of the re-named New-York Times is published, capitalizing on interest in news of the Civil War.
1861 – There are twenty advertising agencies in New York City.
1864 – William James Carlton begins selling advertising space in newspapers, founding the agency that later became the J. Walter Thompson Company, the oldest American advertising agency in continuous existence.
1869 – George P. Rowell issues the first Rowell’s American Newspaper Directory, providing advertisers with information on the estimated circulation of papers and thus helping to standardize value for space in advertising.
1870 – 5,091 newspapers are in circulation, compared to 715 in 1830.
1879 – John Wanamaker places the first whole-page newspaper advertisement by an American department store.
1870s – $1 million dollars is spent annually advertising Lydia Pinkham’s Pink Pills.
1885 – New postal regulations reduce the cost of second class mailing to one cent per pound, allowing an almost immediate increase in the number of new subscription-based periodicals.
1889 – James B. Duke spends 20 per cent of the gross sale of his tobacco company earnings ($80,000) towards advertising.
1890s – Women are depicted outside the home in a non-domestic setting for the first time in bicycle ads.

BTW, I saw Cold Mountain last night. As fine as the book. Renee Zellweger excelled.