Inventing for Boys

by A. Frederick Collins

Now the kind of publications in which you will want your article to appear will hinge on the class of readers who will be interested in it. But let’s suppose that it is a new machine, or a new electrical apparatus of some sort or other. If it is a machine send your typewritten article to the editor of the Scientific American, Woolworth Building, New York; if your photos and article appeal to the editor as being new and novel he will most certainly print them in his paper.

In an article of this kind it is not good policy to crack up yourself or put in your street number, as this savors too much of trying to get a page or so of advertising in the body of the paper free of charge; your name and the city where you live are enough to include in the article, but in a letter accompanying the latter you can send your detailed address. And you can send in another article and photos to the Engineering Magazine, 140 Nassau Street, New York; Machinery, 140 Lafayette Street, New York, and other publications of a like character.

Should your invention be electrical, or have a single electric element connected with it, send your article to the Electrical World, 239 West 39th Street and to the Electrical Review, 13 Park Row, both of New York, and the editors of either of these publications will most surely and gladly accommodate you with space for your contribution.

The purpose of having articles appear in these technical papers is not so much to sell your product as it is to give you an authentic article in a standard publication which you can refer to and reprint from for distribution to those whom you may want to interest either as partners or shareholders. Reprints are also useful for circularizing agents or consumers after you have your factory in shape to take care of the orders.

Should your invention have to do with mining send in your article and photographs to the mining papers, if it is in the notion line mail it to the dry-goods papers and so on for no matter what you have invented you will find one or more trade papers in that particular field who will give you the desired publicity.

After some good technical, or trade paper has published an account of your invention the daily and weekly papers in your home-town are apt to be impressed with the importance of what you have done and one or all of them will give you quite a write-up.

Advertising.—While publicity and advertising are one and the same thing in that both of them make known to the great body of buyers the merits of your invention I have arbitrarily divided them into two classes calling (1) everything that is printed as straight reading matter in a paper and free of charge publicity and (2) all that is displayed to attract the attention of the reader and paid for at space rates as advertising.

You can begin an advertising campaign with a very small outlay of capital by running a ½ inch, one column wide ad in ten or a dozen papers or magazines as a starter. To have your ad displayed as you want it, that is the style of type and the illustration that goes with it, get your local printer to set it up and have as many electrotypes made from it as there are papers you intend to buy space in. Then all you have to do is to mail one of these electrotypes to the publisher and it appears in his paper exactly like the type from which it was made and it can be used over and over again.

This stereotyped kind of an ad which meets the reader’s eye in nearly every publication he picks up will finally get through the pores of the calcium salts which form his skull and impress the sensitive area of his brain, or, to use the language Evelyn doesn’t like, it gets on his nerves and he will read it. Every time he sees it after that he will remember its message and then when the psychological moment arrives and he wants your product he will send to you either for a catalogue and price-list or for the thing itself.