This first filter he sold for 75 cents, and with the profits on this sale he bought several more of the pails and a quantity of the charcoal, with a few yards of flannel, and made these up as before. The people of his town were glad to get so good a filter for that price and he supplied several hundred families, and his net profits were sufficient to maintain him. He is now making filters for other towns.
A poor widow, living in a small southern city, was practically dependent upon a splendid cow, which gave more milk than she and her few customers could use.
She therefore conceived the idea of converting this surplus into condensed milk that would keep for an indefinite period, and bring good prices when shipped to city customers by parcel post.
Taking 10,000 parts of fresh milk, 50 parts of white sugar, and 2 parts of carbonate of soda, she placed all in a porcelain vessel, and with constant stirring evaporated by heat of vapor bath at 140 to 160 degrees to the consistence of a thick paste.
Placing this paste in small glass jars, she sold it readily at fair prices, and realized a good profit from its sale. One pint of this paste is equal to ten pints of fresh milk, and being a distinctively country product of assured purity and cleanliness brought a good living to this woman.
He published a weekly newspaper in a field that was covered by one of the papers of a large city about thirty miles away, and he was very desirous of showing a special service to the people in his community. He made it a point to find out the people who came into the city, and to ascertain this early. So each morning he went to the Water Department of his city and obtained the names and addresses of parties who had water turned on, and from this information, made a statement in his paper concerning each person’s arrival. When the paper was published, he sent a boy around to get the newcomer’s subscription. When there was a refusal, the boy was instructed to say: “Well, the editor desired you to have a copy anyway, so I will leave this copy.” The new arrival, upon reading over the paper, found his name mentioned, and on his next call the boy easily secured a subscriber.
This is an excellent way for a person running a small paper close to a large city to build up his subscription list. This man succeeded to the extent of seven or eight hundred dollars a year.