David Rosenthal

So some of these enterprising, traveling snake oil salesmen started scaling up the medicines that they were making to meet all this new demand.

And as they scale up and they start to standardize the products that they are offering...

This industry comes to be known as patent medicines.

Now, most of these medicines were not actually patented, but as the producer of them, you wanted customers and would-be competitors to think that they were, that there was some sort of barrier to entry.

Yes.

So pretty quickly, these newly scaling patent medicine guys discover that the best way to reinforce that message with consumers and to stimulate demand is

was advertising, especially in newspapers.

And this is the birth of the advertising industry in America.

It's these patent medicines that start spending the first real scale dollars in newspapers, which are also coming up and industrializing post-Civil War and building the business model of the media industry as we know it today.

Because just like you were talking about in your great Charlie thought experiment from the intro,

What are these patent medicines?

It's just commodities.

It's like leaves and like nuts and water and stuff that go into these things.

Extracts, David.

Extracts, right.

Okay.

It's super cheap commodities that are very easy to obtain in great quantities, very easy to then produce into your product and transform, and then pretty small relative to other products, easy to transport around the country.

you do start to get some of these patent medicines that scale up and build early national brands in this day.

So you might think that all this is like ancient history.

A whole bunch of products that we still buy today started as patent medicines.