20 Everyday Things You Once Couldn’t Buy Without A Specialist

President Franklin Roosevelt’s Executive Order 6102 of 1933 and Congress’s passage of the Gold Reserve Act of 1934 made it a federal crime for a citizen to own or purchase gold bullion or gold coins as an investment. The U.S. Treasury would only issue gold purchase licenses to certified industrial users, such as jewelers and dental labs, not to private investors. Private ownership of gold was prohibited until the end of 1974.

In the 19th century, dentures were custom-made. The dentist took a wax or plaster cast of his patient’s mouth, then produced a denture plate of gold or vulcanite, a hard rubber patented in the 1850s, and inserted individual teeth into the plate. The teeth themselves were individually carved by hand or fired in a kiln and were specific to the person who owned them. Wooden dentures, as the cliché would have it, didn’t exist.

The Rolls-Royce and Duesenberg, the pinnacles of the luxury market, provided their clientele with no more than a rolling chassis, including the engine, frame, and drivetrain. It was up to the customer to choose from the lists of coachbuilders, such as Park Ward, Brewster, Hooper, and so on, who would construct a car with an exterior and interior suited to the buyer’s whims. In the United States, Packard built complete automobiles in-house for its volume brands, but it also sold its chassis to independent coachbuilders.

The corsetiere, or staymaker, had it figured out in the 1700s and 1800s, because no two bodies are alike. A poorly fitting corset didn’t do much good, so a customer had to be measured, given a handmade pattern, and fitted with whalebone, cane, or steel boning adjusted during several visits. Catalog corsets were available by the late 1800s, but even then, you needed a specialist for a well-constructed one until stretch fabrics came along a few decades later.

James Edward Hanger, a Confederate soldier whose leg was amputated near the beginning of the American Civil War, began the Hanger Company in 1861. Every stump heals differently, so each one must be measured and fitted individually. Soldiers of the Civil War and later, of World War One, needed a craftsman to take a plaster cast of their stumps, and then design and fit metal hinges and wood or leather cups. The Hanger Company has outlived its founder by several generations.

From the 1820s through the 1850s, bloodletting for fever or inflammation was a common medical procedure across Europe and North America. To carry out the procedure, physicians had to acquire an instrument: a live leech. Importers and apothecaries maintained large stocks of leeches, which they kept alive in water tanks. They were so much in demand that European leech populations were overharvested. Far from being a relic from the Middle Ages, leeching was a booming business.

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, if you had poor eyesight, you could get a simple magnifying glass from a peddler, but that wouldn’t help much with astigmatism. To fix your eyesight, you had to visit an optician. The optician would measure your refractive error, focal length, and interpupillary distance, then grind out glass lenses by hand to be inserted in a frame made of horn, tortoiseshell, or metal. This was not something you picked up ready-made.

Prior to electronic trading, you had to open a brokerage account and make a phone call to your broker to purchase even a single share of a publicly traded company. The broker then passed along your buy order via telephone or telegraph to a floor broker, who would execute your trade on the floor of the stock exchange, either the New York Stock Exchange or the London Stock Exchange. Stocks there were traded in paper form.

On Savile Row, a famed tailor’s street in London, suits were once custom-made for clients. A tailor measured his customer and drafted a new paper pattern from scratch rather than altering a pattern from a factory. He then hand-cut the cloth and built up the support canvas in the suit with successive “bastes,” or fittings. The quality of cloth was only part of what made a suit bespoke. The other crucial element was the pattern, drafted by the tailor for his client. Today, you can walk into an office and see everyone wearing practically the same suit, all purchased from the same store. I think it’s about time we brought some individuality back!

Racehorse buyers were accustomed to spending hard currency on a racehorse with an acceptable pedigree, one that could be verified as being of proven value. Buyers might employ a bloodstock agent or go through an auction house like Tattersalls, established in England in 1766, to ensure the quality of the horse’s health and ancestry according to the specifications contained in the General Stud Book, compiled by Weatherbys and first issued in 1791. A pedigreed racehorse was quite distinct from the farm animals sold at regular horse fairs.

While Alfred Nobel invented dynamite in 1867, it was regulated very differently on either side of the Atlantic Ocean. In Great Britain, the Explosives Act of 1875 required the sale of high explosives to only licensed magazine keepers and authorized distributors. In North America, however, farmers and miners could purchase dynamite directly from their local hardware store or from mail-order catalogs like Sears, Roebuck & Co. beginning in 1902, until decades later when stricter safety regulations were put in place.

It’s easy to forget that the initial control measures introduced in Britain didn’t prevent anyone from selling arsenic, but rather made vendors keep records of who bought what. Following a series of poisoning deaths, the Arsenic Act 1851 demanded that any seller must maintain a “poison register,” with the buyer filling in their full name and address, along with the purpose of the purchase. It also required that pure arsenic be mixed with soot or dyed blue with indigo. However, there was no restriction on who could sell the arsenic, even to the general public from the local shopkeeper. Sales weren’t restricted to registered chemists until the Pharmacy Act of 1868, some 17 years later.

In the 17th and 18th centuries, a powdered wig was standard dress for gentlemen, aristocrats, and lawyers in Europe and in American cities. And like every other good gentleman’s outfit, a proper wig began with a visit to a perruquier, a master wigmaker. The man would measure his patron’s head, then buy human, horse, or goat hair. He knotted each individual strand to a silk net foundation, then curled and powdered the resulting wig to suit the status of the wearer. Wigs were still considered luxury items at the time, though, and the best were saved for special occasions.

The cathedral organ was not a product. It was a project. Organ builders, like Aristide Cavaille-Coll in France or Ernest Skinner in the U.S., figured out how much reverb and loudness a given hall had. They assembled the organ’s internal windchests and cast the organ pipes out of tin and lead alloys. They then brought the pipes to the cathedral and tuned every single one of them over several weeks to that particular room’s acoustics. Take the organ away and its tone changes.

In the 1800s and early 1900s, getting life insurance wasn’t as simple as completing an application and mailing off a check. An insurance agent would take your application, but a corporate underwriter would evaluate your doctor’s physical, your family medical history, and any potential risks related to your job before deciding what rate to charge you. All of that process was done by hand.

Before the emergence of transistorized hearing aids in the mid-1900s, the hearing-impaired relied on custom-made hearing trumpets. Firms like F.C. Rein and Son of London, founded in 1800, would inspect the patient’s ear and design brass, vulcanite, or silver hearing trumpets in proportions that would best serve that individual. The instruments were acoustic devices designed specifically to address the needs of one person.

Back in the late 19th century, affluent collectors and university libraries sought out books that were printed before 1501, called incunabula, or medieval illuminated manuscripts. To authenticate such items, they had to consult a specialist. Booksellers like Bernard Quaritch of London and A.S.W. Rosenbach of Philadelphia checked the watermarks in the paper, the position of the signatures on each page, the binding, and the provenance of every book prior to sale. They didn’t want to sell forgeries or incomplete texts.

For a fine fur coat, mink, sable or ermine, the whole process depended upon the selection of the individual pelts. They were never identical, in pile, color, or skin quality. The master furrier selected the individual skins, supervised their dressing to make them supple, and then cut and resewed them by a technique called letting-out. This involved splitting each pelt diagonally and stitching them together again, creating one beautiful fur coat fitted to the buyer’s exact shape.

Until the standardization of shoe sizes and the advent of mass-produced rubber soles toward the end of the 19th century, shoes were made by a cordwainer, who measured the length, girth, and arch of your foot, hand-carved a wooden last for your particular foot, and stitched leather uppers to welted soles. Guild law was very clear that cobblers were not permitted to do this, only to mend existing shoes.

Even great captains of industry like J.P. Morgan, Henry Clay Frick, and Andrew Mellon, whose collections of European Old Master paintings became world-renowned, did not make purchases at a counter in a gallery. They bought via international dealers, most notably Joseph Duveen. He located and evaluated private collections in Europe, employed specialists to authenticate and check provenance, and brought about the sales. Many of those paintings are now seen at large, public museums.

This content was created with the help of AI.