In the year 1878 the American businessman first became hitched to the telephone. Not that the telephone was new that year. The businessman had come to know it as an instrument for talking at some distance by means of a pair of telephones connected with telegraph wires or wires put up for that purpose. He could, for instance, lease such a pair of phones for $12 a year from the Bell Telephone Company of Boston. But such use of the new instrument was limited.

The striking problem faced by the labor administrator in the early Connecticut button industry was the shortage of native skilled artisans. While unskilled laborers, bookkeepers, and even managers could be drawn from sources in this country, highly skilled artisans were usually available only in England. The shortage of skilled labor thus truly constituted the bottleneck to quality production. In the correspondence of Alexander Hamilton, for the year 1791, there is a letter from one John Mix, pewter buttonmaker of New Haven, reporting that he was going to produce diverse kinds of buttons. This was possible “because we have a person lately from Europe who has the skill perfectly who is a gentleman who is able and has engaged to instruct and teach us everything necessary in the making of them.”

For the past eleven years we have witnessed real estate values receding in Boston as well as in all the other older cities. This span of time, although short in the history of a city, represents a fairly large portion of the life of a real estate owner. The buying and selling of real estate since 1936 has been quite as extensive as in the normal years previous to the first World War. Real estate prices, however, in some of the older business and residential sections of the city of Boston have returned to levels below those of the pre-Civil War years.

Business history presents so many problems and opportunities that I hardly know which ones to discuss in the time available or where to start. Perhaps it is well to begin by reminding ourselves just what business history is, for there is a great deal of misunderstanding on this point. I refuse to attempt a precise definition because it seems to be impossible to obtain a satisfactory definition of the term “business” itself, but I think that I can give a fairly clear idea of the scope of the field.

In May, 1914, a small group of friends of the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration and admirers of James J. Hill took the initiative in founding a Professorship of Transportation in his honor and to bear his name. The group consisted of Robert Bacon. George F. Baker, Howard Elliott, Arthur Curtis James, Thomas W. Lamont, Robert T. Lincoln, and J. P. Morgan. Seventy-four persons contributed an aggregate of $125,000, and the endowment of the professorship was announced by President Lowell at the 1915 Commencement exercises with the statement that “the Chair marks an epoch in the life of the School, and by its recognition of transportation as a permanent object of systematic instruction, in the life of the nation also.”

Here is a much needed authoritative biography of one of America's greatest industrial capitalists—at least the peer of Vanderbilt, Hill, Carnegie, and Ford. Its two ample volumes provide us with facts old and new, corrections of previous judgments, and the author's own inimitable way of putting things.

The oldest business man genetically, and still the most important in numbers, is the petty capitalist. He is that man who owns and manages his relatively small business and often does some or all of the work himself—today we see him as the small contractor, garage-owner, storekeeper, banker, the commercial farmer, individual realtor, and so on. He is the only business man who is owner, administrator—that is, policy-maker and manager—and worker all in one. He is not always the worker, however, and at times he delegates part of the management, but he at least combines ownership and the top administration of his business.

In a sketch of the activities of a Genoese public notary of the late twelfth century, which appeared in this Bulletin some time ago, it was pointed out that his records included a considerable number of partnership contracts. Such contracts were almost always concluded for the purpose of trading overseas. As we know, the Genoese merchants of the twelfth century were chiefly engaged in the trade with North Africa, Romania (the Byzantine Empire), the Levant, and also Spain, southern France, Sicily, and Sardinia.

The history of business education is still to be written. It would make an interesting story, one that would deal not only with training for business but also with the condition and the problems of business through the centuries. Especially revealing would be the development of ideas and institutions concerned with training for administration. The importance of such training was recognized early; in the fourth century B. C., Xenophon in his Oeconomicus wrote about training for management, and a father in thirteenth-century Norway, as recorded in The King's Mirror, advised his son what he should learn in preparation for a career as a merchant.

A familiar figure in ancient Greek and Latin literature is the traveling merchant. Sometimes we find him in his work, usually having some adventure, even exploring new lands. Plautus, who lived in 254-184 B. C. and used Greek themes and contemporary figures in his comedies, made such a merchant the hero of his play, Mercator. The play deals with a young Athenian traveling merchant by the name of Charinus.

What does it take to be successful in business? In the letter printed below, a doctor advised a brother who contemplated entering trade in a certain small Massachusetts town in the year 1807. In spite of its quaint tone, the letter raises interesting questions. Is the doctor's analysis of the situation essentially sound? What do you think of the qualifications he lists for success in trade in this instance? Does this simple consideration of the question have meaning for other times and business situations?

“Pieces of eight, pieces of eight!” screamed Captain Flint's parrot in Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island. Yet, how many of us, who as youngsters dreamed over that tale of adventure, realized that the bird spoke the correct name for what our American and English forefathers called the Spanish dollar?