From 1929: Buy your mom a canary for Mother's Day

This advertisment from the May 3, 1929, edition of the Lancaster (Pennsylvania) Intelligencer Journal urges folks to buy a $4.95 canary from Keystone Furniture Company as a Mother's Day gift. 

There are many guarantees, including that the birds are "Guaranteed Genuine Imported, Male Hartz Mt. and St. Andreasburg Rollers." That refers to Harz Rollers (from the mountains of Germany), and St. Andreasberg Rollers, which are a substrain of that canary. 

That $4.95 pricetag (payable in installments of 50 cents per week) would be a whopping $92 today. And of course Keystone Furniture was happy to also sell you a cage and stand to go with your pricey songbird.

From roughly the 1880s through the mid-1930s, hundreds of thousands of German canaries were shipped to the United States each year. It was quite the prosperous trade, though all I can think about are the birds being shipped across the Atlantic and then across the United States.

According to an article by Robert Francis on the website US Bird History, "These birds mostly came from Germany, where there were entire villages whose primary industry was breeding and selling canaries. Shipping these birds was an exhausting, treacherous work that rested on the backs – sometimes literally – of traveling merchants."

Merchants might carry 200 hundreds birds on their back to reach market. The best birds were saved for German buyers, who would pay exhorbitant prices, Francis explains. After that, sellers focused more on the hardiness of the birds, rather than their singing ability, in deciding which ones to send across the Atlantic.

"If Fritz could make it to New York with 85 percent of his canaries still breathing, both he and his employer would be happy," Francis writes, citing the 1888 book Canaries and Cage-Birds by George Holden.

It would have been far more humane in 1929 to just buy Mom some flowers or chocolate, either of which would most likely have been produced domestically. (That's not necessarily the case today, when the great majority of Mother's Day flowers and chocolates and imported and there are real concerns about the labor practices in the countries providing them to us.)

A Confederate bill under the bed

After my grandmother, Helen Chandler Adams Ingham, died in the summer of 2003, we began the gradual, yearslong process of cleaning out the house on Oak Crest Lane in Wallingford. So it was probably late 2003 or early 2004 that Mom and I first came across a box of miscellanous papers under my grandmother's bed. I'm fairly certain the City of Wilmington scrip I wrote about last month was in the box. Probably some old wills or deeds, too.

And so was an envelope with "P E R S O N A L" and "CONFEDERATE $100 BILL" typed on it.

As advertised, inside the envelope was a taped and tattered piece of Confederacy currency, a $100 bill. It features an image of Lucy Pickens (1832-1899), aka "Queen of the Confederacy," in the center, bears an issue date of February 17, 1864, and states that it is redeemable "two years after the ratification of a treaty of peace." It would not turn out to be redeemable. After the Confederates surrendered to conclude the American Civil War in 1865, the more than $1 billion in currency they had issued became utterly worthless. It holds modern-day value only for collectors. 

I have no idea why members of my family held onto this Confederate $100 bill. I do know that my great-grandfather, in particular, was a Civil War buff and had numerous books on the topic. Occam's Razor suggests someone simply found it an interesting collectible and/or it was forgotten about for decades at a time. 

I don't think anyone in that part of my family tree — most of whom lived in Delaware, Pennsylvania or Maryland — was a Confederate supporter or sympathizer, but of course I have no way of knowing what may have been in their hearts and minds. My grandmother did extensive family genealogical research, and I still have many of the papers and documents she tracked down. (No one else wanted them, really.) I haven't examined closely what my distant ancestors' specific relationship with slavery was, but even if there was nothing direct, we know that nearly all white Americans, North and South, benefited from the long existence of that hateful, dehumanizing, institutionalized oppression.

I'm not going to keep this bill. I feel no need to be the person in the family line who passes it down to another generation, even further removed from any original rationale for keeping it. It's interesting as ephemera, of course, but I don't need it residing in a drawer or envelope. 

"Inventions Wanted" in November 1968 Popular Electronics

I still enjoy looking through classified advertisements in old magazines.¹ Physical media, so little of it digitized, remains a portal into the past and a valuable archive. For my first look at the November 1968 issue of Popular Electronics, I'm checking out some of the Inventions Wanted portion of the classified advertisements at the back of the magazine.² 

• The Wall Street Invention Brokerage, which claimed "10 years proven performances," offered to develop and help sell ideas and inventions, patented or unpatented. "Our national manufacturer clients are urgently seeking new items for outright cash sale or royalties."
• Pioneer Invention Service, located on Broadway in New York City, offered inventors "free expert analysis" and, whoa, a "free invention certificate," whatever that means. Everything was "strictly confidential."
• Voron Electronics, located on East Mermaid Lane in Philadelphia, was seeking electronic or electrical inventions. The George Voron Company was, among other things, involved with "piped-in music," according to this article on Broadcast Pioneers of Philadelphia.
• Gilbert Adams, Invention Broker, of New York City urged inventors to "sell your invention for cash or royalties! Our client manufacturers eagerly seek new items. ... Financial assistance if needed. 25 years proven performances."

The Federal Trade Commission (which has been targeted this year by the Trump administration) has worked over the decades to protect inventors from those who might use deceptive or unfair practices to acquire their work and ideas. A 1980 synopsis of FTC decisions over the years states, "It is an unfair or deceptive act or practice for a seller of idea or invention promotion or development services to misrepresent, directly or indirectly, that potential purchasers will be provided with evaluations or appraisals of the patentability, merit or marketability of ideas or inventions."

In 1997, the FTC set up Project Mousetrap, which was aimed at identifying, prosecuting and fining firms that engaged in fraudulent or deceptive practices aimed at inventors. In a news release, 

"It is a fact that less than one percent of all new product concepts succeed in the marketplace," Jodie Bernstein, director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, stated that year. "Yet the fraudulent firms in this industry conclude, after a 'professional' evaluation, that virtually every new idea or product crossing their desks is patentable and has 'tremendous market potential.' They promise enthusiastic inventors that they can provide professional assistance in getting a patent and securing licensing and manufacturing agreements with manufacturers. Time after time, however, these firms lie to consumers about the sincerity of their belief in an idea and its marketability. Mark Twain once said that the name of the greatest inventor is accident. But it is no accident that these firms profit while the dreams of their customers die. That is their plan, and up to now, they have been very successful in perpetrating that plan. Virtually no consumers have even made back their investment, let alone any profit, from these companies' services."

We should be very thankful for the FTC.

Footnotes

1. See, for example:

• Classified ads from 1974 issue of The Monster Times
• "Fate" classifieds, August 1975
• 30 classified ads from the June 1971 issue of "Fate" magazine
• Some 1965 Amazing Stories ads were too amazing to be true

2. The rest of the Electronics Market Place classifieds include For Sale, Plans and Kits, High Fidelity, Shortwave Listening, Wanted, Tubes, Tape and Recorders, Repair and Services, Instruction, Personals, Government Surplus, Books, Authors' Services, Music, Musical Instruments, Rubber Stamps, Magnets, Photography — Film, Equipment, Services, Records, Hypnotism, Plastics, Educational Opportunities, Printing, Remailing Service, Business Opportunities, Real Estate, Stamps, Taxidermy, and Miscellaneous. Yes, taxidermy.