On today’s date January 25, 1783 William Colgate, who founded the well known personal hygiene product company, was born in Hollingbourne, Kent, England. His family would later move to America and settle in Maryland...
“William Colgate attended one of the best
schools in Baltimore for the first two years of his life in America. This training, added to the discipline of his boyhood in England, completed his school education. At the age of fifteen he entered upon the earnest work of life. At seventeen he in a humble way, with scarcely any capital or credit, engaged in the soap-and-candle business in Baltimore. At that time manufacturers were greatly needed in all the growing cities of the New World.
By a kind of instinct of great possibilities, and
the inspiration of great purposes, and perhaps to escape embarrassing associations with the business misfortunes of the family in Baltimore, young Colgate decided to make the metropolis of the country his home and place of business. In 1804, at the age of eighteen, he came, first to Mamaroneck, and, after a brief sojourn there, to New York City, and there began, with neither money, credit, nor friends, his illustrious business career.
The secret of his success is disclosed in the principles which governed him. He determined first to master in all its methods and appliances the business he had chosen.
Almost immediately upon his arrival in New
York, early one morning he applied at the counting-room of John Slidel & Co., then the largest tallow-chandlers in the city, located at 50 Broadway. There was no vacancy in the establishment, but Mr. Slidel, struck with the open, honest face of the applicant, offered him a place as assistant clerk.
The young Englishman thanked him for his
kind proposal, but most respectfully declined it, remarking, "I desire, sir, to learn the business. I wish to work to earn a living for myself. Any one can assist a clerk, but I wish to know how to work."
There is the secret of success in the great competitions of business, for the skilled workman naturally acquires control. In old-established houses on both sides of the sea it is more and more felt that only through the discipline of the apprentice and the skilled journeyman can one safely assume the direction of a great manufacturing of commercial house. Capital without skill can never keep pace with capital supplemented by skill. For lack of this combination hundreds of adventurous business-houses have failed.
Mr. Slidel was so much pleased with the frankness of young Colgate, and his ambition to master a business, that he called his foreman and said, “Give this young man work; show him everything about the business. He will be of great service to you."
The salary proposed was small, but it was the
business he sought, and in a short time he became an expert in it. He was transferred from the manufacturing to the sales department, and soon grasped its commercial methods, so that at the end of three years, when the firm was changed, William Colgate became its principal business manager. In 1806, at the age of twenty-three, he started in the chandlery business in Dutch Street...”
From: William Colgate: The Christian layman
by William Wallace Evert, published in 1881 via Library of Congress, no known restrictions
https://archive.org/details/williamcolgatech00ever/page/66Image: The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Print Collection, The New York Public Library. "Deacon William Colgate"
* * *
Affordable Wordpress website host at
www.greengeeks.com Linkback:
https://tubagbohol.mikeligalig.com/index.php?topic=124026.0
