Hopkins began to post more than 400,000 pamphlets for Dr. Shoop’s every day, reaching millions with this pioneering effort at “direct mail” advertising, or what we now call “spam.”

For all our secular rationalism and technological advances, potential for surrender to the charms of magical thinking remains embedded in the human psyche, awaiting only the advertiser to awaken it.

A few more signal tricks rounded out the medicine advertising approach. Perhaps chief among these was the “secret ingredient.” Every patent medicine needed something to set it apart from all the others making similar claims, some kind of mysterious element that was not and perhaps could not be fully explained.

How much of this story is true we may never know, but what we do know for certain is that, at the time, Clark Stanley the Rattlesnake King was among the most successful advertisers in America, forming a part of the growing “patent medicine” industry. His snake oil liniment was only one of dozens of products, like “Lydia Pinkham’s Herb Medicine” or

Attention, after all, is ultimately a zero-sum game. But let us not get too far ahead of the story.

At the dawn of the attention industries, then, religion was still, in a very real sense, the incumbent operation, the only large-scale human endeavor designed to capture attention and use it.

Before the democratic age ushered in by the nineteenth century, most political powers had no need to influence the governed.

Attention in our sense of it was not vital for commerce as it has become. In a manner that still holds for some professions, like medicine, or for small businesses, merchants typically relied on a good reputation or a network of custom to attract business.

Before the nineteenth century, human attention was a largely untapped resource in relation to its eventual commercial and political applications.