INTRODUCTION
BY J. DOUGLAS EDWARDS
James Buchanan Brady could borrow millions on the strength of his name. Before he was thirty, he was creating a legend. Brady hobnobbed with the leading industrialists and financiers of the day. Lillian Russell, the most glamorous actress of the Gay Nineties, was his great friend and frequent companion.
You know this man by his trademark. Diamond Jim walked around wearing more wealth than most banks held in their vaults. His cufflinks, watch, cane, and every finger glittered with diamonds.
Why am I telling you about this man? Because Diamond Jim Brady was a salesman. He made more money selling railroad equipment than he could get rid of as Broadway's biggest spender. Brady was a superpro.
Selling itself goes far back beyond that. We know that Stone Age men traveled great distances to trade for goods they couldn’t get where they hunted and gathered food. There’s reason to believe that barter is older than war, that we’re all descended from peaceful traders—salespeople, because barter requires salesmanship—rather than from violent marauders who lived on plunder.
The next development in selling was the open-air marketplace. But before history dawned, the exposed marketplace was pretty much obsolete. Merchants were moving inside and selling from permanent stores. Wandering traders were now carrying less merchandise on their backs and more on animals and ships. Then development stopped except for details, and this ancient system for distributing goods came over to the New World.
In the early 1800s, a revolutionary development took place and selling, as we now know it, was born. It happened very quietly. The owners of a small woolen mill in Massachusetts decided they wanted more business than the traders were giving them. With New England directness, they went straight to the heart of the matter. They hired a man to take their samples to shops in distant places and get orders for future delivery. This seems painfully obvious now, but it was a startling innovation in those days. It took intelligence to conceive
