Keith,

Now you will have to invest in an inkpad so you can stamp everything you mail!

Love it!

happy hunting,

Here is a very early Ball Retail Ad from December 1884 in which he is featuring Elgin Watches.

One of the earliest ads in 1881 appeared in minutes of the Ohio Conference. The ad featuring Elgin above also appeared in that conference!

happy hunting

Oh N0 Mr. Bill

I have lost one of my activities, good job.

Tom

And in 1895 Advertising in the Northern Steamship Mag, we get a two-fer.

Apparantly Ball still had some of those spoons to sell!

Tom, I can do them as long as they are only one page size, I still haven't figured out how to combine two pics into one.

happy hunting

And thanks to Bill I will have my own Garfield spoon soon.

Tom

Tom,

here is the patent for our spoons.

patent

happy hunting

Thanks Bill!

I also picked up another spoon stamped Webb C. Ball Co.., it is a lot larger than the Garfield spoon. It was given as an award to some organization called the C.A.C. in 1944.

Tom

Ball advertised extensively in the different Union magazines but we know that he had some problems with union members.

union members complaints

. Keeping in mind that Union marked watches sold for the same price as the non union ORRS watches, wouldn't you think the employees would always choose a Union marked watch?

The rarity of these early Brotherhood watches even though Ball and the Journals cooperated in giving away watches to those who sold enough journal subscriptions confirms that there was resistance to Ball's product amongst the railroad employees.

I think that the subscription offers were Ball's method or marketing to the general public! Checking distribution numbers of the various journals against union membership, we see that readership was over two and three times union membership!

The public must have figured that "official" RR standard as seen in the journals as a great endorsement.

We don't really see Ball advertising much anywhere else, yet the sales of the ORRS logically must have been for the most part to the general public!



happy hunting