[ih] "Father of e-Marketing"

[Bill Ricker]

On Sat, Jun 1, 2019 at 5:35 PM Brian E Carpenter
<brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com> wrote:

> I have nothing concrete about telegraphic spam, but there wasn't really enough automation until 1914 or so to allow anything except manually generated advertising telegrams, which I don't think would count: it's automation that enables spam, surely?

Jacquard punch programming has been rediscovered for text and
non-graphic programming repeatedly!

Wikipedia reports
<< In 1846, Alexander Bain used punched tape to send telegrams.
   This technology was adopted by Charles Wheatstone in 1857 for the
preparation,
    storage and transmission of data in telegraphy.[1]
   [1] Maxfield, Clive (13 October 2011). "How it was: Paper tapes and
punched cards". EE Times.
  >>
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_tape
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Bain_(inventor)

He invented the electric clock, facsimile transmission, and "chemical
telegraph" , which is a precursor of heat-sensitive cash-register
receipts, and could mark received messages so fast he had to invent
off-line composition and automated fast sending.

It doesn't say anything about repeating the same offline message to
multiple addressees; was in only point-to-point use in a few cities,
but spamming Paris from Lille with a commercial directory for
addresses would have been potentially profitable if it happened.

Ok, time to make use of the Google-fu that I developed before Google
was a thing. (I don't mind GOOG using our start-up's business model
sucessfully; we weren't using it.)

Google reports

<<A 1864 Telegram Was The World's First Spam Message - Curiosity
But what was likely the world's first spam message was delivered via
telegraph wires to very confused recipients. In May of 1864, a group
of British politicians received a knock on the door with a telegram
waiting on the other side. Expecting a note of critical national
importance, they were surprised to see an ad inside the envelope. The
telegram communicated that a local dental practice, run by "Messrs
Gabriel," would be open from 10am to 5pm until October. Some of the
recipients were outraged by this unsolicited advertisement, and even
wrote a complaint to the Times: "I have never had any dealings with
Messrs Gabriel and beg to know by what right do they disturb me by a
telegram which is simply the medium of advertisement?" This event
shows how new communication technologies are always met with
surprising new ways of using them
https://curiosity.com/topics/a-1864-telegram-was-the-worlds-first-spam-message-curiosity/
>>

<< Pre-Internet
In the late 19th century, Western Union allowed telegraphic messages
on its network to be sent to multiple destinations. The first recorded
instance of a mass unsolicited commercial telegram is from May 1864,
when some British politicians received an unsolicited telegram
advertising a dentist.[13]
[13] "Getting the message, at last". The Economist. 2007-12-14.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spamming#Pre-Internet
>>

In 1864, that could well have been Wheatstone telegraphy using Bain's
sender as opposed to Morse telegraphy ... or the dentist may simply
have paid his local Telegraph office to deliver paper copies locally
by foot w/o any electric transmission at all. (Equivalent of paying
urchins to deliver handbills but with value-add of a uniform and
official telegraph office form, so likely to get read. That is much of
the deceptive techniques of eMarketing fully formed!)

-- 
Bill Ricker
bill.n1vux at gmail.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/n1vux