Trade Card, Change Gear and Bevel Drive, Hess-Bright Manufacturing Co., circa 1906

In the last third of the nineteenth century, an unprecedented variety of consumer goods and services flooded the American market. Advertisers, armed with new methods of color printing, bombarded potential customers with trade cards. Americans enjoyed and often saved the vibrant little advertisements found in product packages or distributed by local merchants. Many survive as historical records of commercialism in the United States.