It is obvious, therefore, that if the Ingersoll firm has already been able to place fifty million separate watches in the service of humanity, something unprecedented must have taken place in the all-important field of distribution. It is significant that Robert H. Ingersoll first called his watch the "Universal;" indeed, his chief contribution to the development of the watch is the idea of _universality_, a word that makes us think more of people than of manufacturers' methods. Having, then, a watch that was universal in its possibilities as well as in name, and being keenly aware, through his own tastes and experiences, of the needs of the vast mass of the public, his greatest problem became that of universal distribution; in short, it was a selling-problem. At first, there could be no definitely formulated plan; various methods must first be tried out. From these experiences there gradually arose an adequate system of reaching the millions of people who needed watches. In this, Mr. Ingersoll had effective cooperation. He was the pioneer, the salesman, the promoter, the one who knew men in the widest sense and had the faculty of getting results. His brother, Charles H., was the internal administrator and constant counselor. Later, there was added to the firm a nephew, William H., who was both a student and an analyst. He scrutinized trade-tendencies, deduced theories from what he saw, and gave them wide application in actual tests. Together the members of the firm worked out sales-principles of equal opportunity and equal treatment—words that had long constituted a slogan in politics but were something of a novelty as applied to business. In other words, they based their plans upon the _consumer_ rather than upon the _factory_, and upon the idea of goods sold _through_ the trade rather than _to_ the trade. It took some time, however, to perfect their system of distribution but, when finally developed, it was the outgrowth of wide and varied experience. The firm made its first sales-efforts on the watch through its own mail-order catalog. The results brought some encouragement, but proved that in itself this method could never bring the volume of sales necessary for a high-geared, uniform quantity of production.