MODERN PROGRESS

Evening Star, Issue 20778, 28 April 1931, Page 5

MODERN PROGRESS

ADVERTISING FACTOR IN RAPID ADVANCE Now that New Zealand is ■ tackling the “ depression ” in practical fashion and looking ahead to the new business that must develop slowly but surely it is very interesting to read an extract from the remarks made l.y Miss Jeanette Carroll a prominent American business woman, at a recent gathering of business people in the United States. “Our rapid progress as we know it to-day,” Miss Carroll said, “appears to be largely dependent on three important factors—transportation facilities, means of communication, and advertising. The progress of material civilisation was incredibly slow when advertising was lacking to educate and to stir the masses to desire, demand and labour for better things. One of the most curious examples of this truth is to be found in the history of plumbing. The ancient Romans had a pretty good system of plumbing, the household water being brought over immense aqueducts from the hills fifty miles distant. Some of these leaden pipes were made in England, and boro a British trade mark, for Britain was a Roman colony in the days of the Caesars. “ Yet early in the seventeenth century London’s water mains were hollowed logs, tree trunks. “In ]8&0 the average American homo had neither a bathtub nor running water—2,ooo years after a very complete and efficient plumbing system was in use in Imperial Rome. “It took twenty centuries for people to awaken to the comforts and hygienic value of plumbing and bathtubs and within a comparatively few years good plumbing has become not only a necessity to American lile, but extraordinary advances have been made in the way of beauty and ornamentation of bathrooms, with lovely tinted porcelain tiles and fixtures, and gay, cheerful colour in curtains, towels, and soaps. Advertising brought about within a decade or two what the whole sweep of 2,000 years could not bring about without advertising.”