CHAPTER XIII

PROMOTERS AND PROMOTING

IN

N our day, so fine has grown the individualization of men's tasks, promoting has become a profession no less than engineering or journalism. Like the Like the poor, the promoter is ever with us; his presence is among the most familiar of facts.

Exactly what he does, however, the precise sort of activity in which he engages to make him a promoter, is less well known. It will be worth while to describe the creature, and if we can keep him quiet long enough before our kodak, to photograph him, that we may see what he is like, and what his habits are.

Quite generally speaking, the promoter is the man who, acting in his own interest and not in the employ of another, finds out new ways or new fields for the probably profitable use of capital, and then gets people of means effectively interested in these promising chances.

But you would be so far forth a promoter if you did but one of these things. Lesseps was a promoter in putting through the Suez Canal, although the certainty of huge profit from such a canal was no new thought of his, but the commonplace observation of 6,000 generations. On the other hand, though the promoter need not be and usually is not an inventor in the technical sense, like Eli Whitney or Tesla, his most important office often lies in the discovery of opportunity rather than in the directing of financial attention to the opportunity. That steel would supplant wood and iron in a million uses, and do this permanently; that coal oil must be the common people's illuminant for years and years in every civilized country; that judicious combination, taking the place of competition, immensely cheapens production; and that price control in a commodity was possible without dominating the entire output, were "promotory" insights of the first order.

Having ascertained how new money can probably be made and having created and

organized financial interest in his project on the part of wealth owners willing to invest, the promoter also, as a rule, performs the various drudgery required to unite these investors and put them in possession and control of the proposition waiting to be exploited. If a new railway is proposed, he institutes the corporation, negotiates for the right of way, and performs all the other initial work necessary before the corporation can take over and begin utilizing the property. If a mining scheme is in view, he buys options on the land needing to be controlled. If the project involves or consists in the merging of independent industries or plants under one management, he secures present owners' agreements to enter the "combine" or sell thereto on such and such conditions. Thus the outlines of the promoter's trade begin to become clear.

The promoter is the intermediary between capital and new investment chances, created or discovered by him. He may actually make some new invention valuable for industry and drum up financial interest

therein. Edison has not, I believe, prospectussed any of his inventions with a view to placing them upon the market; but it is conceivable that he might have done so. Oftener promotorship consists in inventing, or at any rate evolving for the market, improved methods of conducting business, as new forms of advertising or of bookkeeping, new ways of dealing with help or material, or of getting goods to customers; in almost any one of which lines novelties might be introduced so momentous as to render a business practically a new thing. The getting up of a successful trust would illustrate, besides much else, this sort of promoting. Wide new applications of inventions afford fields for promotion efforts, as when the gas engine principle is availed of to propel road cars. A patent commonly finds its way into use only as some promoter takes hold of it. The extension of old industry to new fields is usually promoters' work, as the building of cotton mills in South Carolina and Georgia, the starting of iron and steel manufactories in Alabama

and Colorado. The putting of materials to new uses, as the substitution of oleomargarine for butter and of cotton oil for olive oil is frequently a form of promotion; and so is the opening, for any product, of new markets within the country or beyond the

sea.

In every such case it is the promoter who espies the chance for gain, patiently calculates its possibilities, describes these so that others can see them as well as he; gets a "cinch" on them by the purchase of land options or other conditional promises; and then proceeds to enlist the needed money support, to organize this into a corporation, and to set the corporation on its feet working the bonanza.

It will render still more definite our idea of what the promoter is to notice also what he is not. Promoters often join together in firms as lawyers and engineers do. The benefits arising from such union are in many cases great and patent. But, however influential and advantageous the firm may