The inventor does the work and the promoter gets the money. That seems to sum up the popular view of the relation between promotion and technology in nineteenth-century America. Take the typewriter as an example. Thomas A. Edison declared in 1921: “Mr. Christopher L. Sholes was the father of the typewriter and got nothing but trouble and neglect in connection with the invention. He fell into the hands of promoters with the usual results.” Who were these promoters? Edison did not name names, but chief among them were in fact the following: James Densmore, George Washington Newton Yost, the firm of E. Remington & Sons, and finally the latter's selling agents—Wyckoff, Seamans, and Benedict—who in 1886 bought the Remingtons' typewriter property and organized the Remington Standard Typewriter Company, which was eventually succeeded by Remington Rand, Inc. Among all these, Densmore is the one whom Edison had particularly in mind, and the one whom many others have denounced. Indeed, according to one account, the only thing Densmore did for the typewriter was to give Sholes $6,000 for the invention and then turn it over to the Remingtons for a cool million!

The builders of the railroads in the 'thirties included not only inventors and engineers but also businessmen. It is the latter, usually neglected by historians, who solved business problems as significant as the problems of the engineers. At least, that was true of the roads in this study—the Boston & Lowell, the Boston & Worcester, the Eastern, and the Western. Although the formal structure of a business is not very important for small business firms, these four railroads represented at least two or three times the capitalization of the larger factories of that time. The early railroads, except for small branch lines like the Andover & Wilmington, were sufficiently large to demand careful business organizations if the enterprises were to be successful.

For one hundred and forty-four years (or from 1796 to 1940) a certain drug store did business in the town of Beverly, Massachusetts, in the same location, for all but the first two years of this long span. To the writer's generation it was known as Baker's Drug Store, and it stood on the corner of Washington and Cabot streets. In 1796, when Robert Rantoul started his shop, there was no Washington Street and Cabot was called Country Lane. But the young man chose his business and its location well and when, an old man, he came to review his life for his grandchildren, he could point with pride to the success of this and his other ventures.

This is the tale of a nonentity and failure. Were it not for the fame of his brother, the great John, we should know nothing of Ebenezer Hancock. As it is, a handful of his papers have been handed down to us, mixed up with the letters of Brother John the statesman and Uncle Thomas the merchant prince. Because he played poor relation to these celebrities, we can follow the life of a mediocre man who would in the ordinary course of events have been utterly forgotten; what is perhaps more interesting, we can trace his ill-starred business doings, which were probably a great deal nearer to the norm than were memorably successful ventures.