In this age of click-shopping on Amazon or hopping over to your local superstore, it's difficult to imagine that companies once advertised and distributed their products through hat-wearing men rapping their knuckles on front doors. But in the 19th and much of the 20th Century, that's how it was.
This army of traveling salesmen hawked everything from talcum powder and toys to eyeglasses and home appliances, and they presumably all had one arm longer than the other, as all their crap had to be lugged around. And you couldn't just throw it all in a sack; some of it was breakable, and you didn't want to complicate a sale by digging through a pile of samples to find the relevant one. You needed something you could quickly snap open that then allowed you to easily select the relevant object. Which meant someone needed to design a case that would do this.
The wide variety of goods on offer meant the cases ran the gamut from simple briefcases with dividers to more interesting bespoke shapes. Some of the products were glass bottles filled with liquid, requiring stay mechanisms, and some even required on-board electricity.
A bunch of these cases have survived, some from the 1800s, and are now seeing life again on blogs scattered around the web and, of course, eBay. Here are some we found interesting.
This late-1890s J.E. McBrady & Co. case was used to hawk toiletries to drug stores.
This Neon Salesman's sample case is perhaps the coolest we've seen, as it apparently has on-board power. Surprisingly it's from the 1930s, and we're guessing the ooh-aah factor must've been immense at the time.
A salesman from 1940 probably prayed this case wouldn't pop open in the street as he was selling the X-Box of the day, marbles.
