The Exercise of Magnetism In Business Pays Big Dividends

Business is as great a field as the fine ants for the play of imagination. Imagination is the magic wand that adapts old ideas to new conditions.

It is operating every day in every business, to the benefit of the business and 'the consumer.

To take a homely example: Butter is now sold in bricks because some dealer observed that the custom of serving it in pats at the table made bulk butter uneconomical and inconvenient folthe house wife. It required, i'm,agination to break away from the butter tub.

Men have been using shaving mugs for probably a'century before one man realized, the convenience and econoLmy of molding the soap into a small cylinder w'hich could be taken in the hand, applied to the face, and then brought to a lather with the brush.

It took just as much imagination to b'ring about this improvement as it takes to write a "best-seller," and, the soap man's idea probably resulted in more social improvement than can be credited to the average one-fifty novel.

The other day I saw a man buy a pint of ice crea'm in a drug store. Instead of handing the customer a paper pail with a wire handle, the drug clerk picked up a molded brick of crea'm, wrapped it neatly in plain white paper, snapped a rubber bandl around it, and the customer rcarried it out like a box of candy.

Anyone who has carried a pail of ice cream p,asd the watering mouths of a dozen small boys will realize th,at when you carry hom.e your ice creafil it is far more desirable to purchase it in brick form.

Now, there isn't anything brilliant in this ice cream idea, and we arenrt in favor of placing a bus't of the originator in the publ,ic park. He is probably getting his reward in the way of increased profit, which is finally the best evidence of service rendered.

The point we are trying to make here is. that imagination has a high place in all business, and that its exer,cise pays real dividends.

I.magination enables a man to put himself in the other fellow's place.

So that, if 'business is service, certainly that man can render the best service who is able to anticipa'te the wants of his customers by putting himself in their places.

Only yesterday I bought a bottle of an antiseptic solution which is extensively advertised. When I unwrapped it I found, a small corkscrew tied to the side of the ,bottle.

The man that did that had imagination. He, himself, had looked from cellar to garret ,to find a corkscrew small enough to pull a half-inch cork. He had probably tried to pry a cork loose with a knife, and had brokien either the knife or the cork.

A woman sent some bulbs, which grow in water, to an invalid ,in another city. With the bulbs she shipped some small pebbles.

Imagination ! The invalid could not hunt the pebbles on the lake shore herself, and she would hardly know where to buy them. Without pebbles the bulbs were worthless.

Few radically new things are discovered in the course of a vear, or even in a'century.

A moral code was written two thousand years ago, which has never been improved upon.

Up to the pointwhere you get into hydro-dynamics, the basis o,f all mechanics is the wheel, fher lever, and the wedge, all of which have been used for hundreds of years.

It is the new application of old principles that makes progress, and these new applications call for imagination.

Let us not ,think we must be play-wrights or authors to find expression for our imagination.

The opportunity is right at our elbow's end.-(The Fortuna Magazine.)