With watches spiking in popularity across the country, a Minnesota railroad agent named Richard Warren Sears stumbled across a box of unwanted watches from a local jeweler, and turned a tidy profit selling them to other station agents. Inspired by his success, he partnered with a Chicago businessman named Alvah Roebuck, and together they launched a mail-order publication showcasing a range of watch designs: the Sears, Roebuck catalog. Those fifteen pounds of mail-order catalogs currently weighing down your mailbox? They all started with the must-have gadget of the late nineteenth century: the
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