Learning The History Of Auctions
You've probably been to an auction at some point in your life
. You know the routine- an auctioneer at the front screaming what seems to be gibberish a mile a minute, people raising and lowering their hands so frequently it is like they are picking cherries.
They have been an integral part of our lives for centuries. Whether it's for fine art, priceless artifacts, or even for sheep or cattle, people have been going bid crazy ever since it was invented.
They are usually done as an event in a ballroom or conference room, but lately the craze has been to buy or sell through bidding online. An internet user will put something up for sale on a website and users will bid on the product from wherever they are in the world.
Whichever bidder has the highest bid wins the product, and the seller ships it to wherever they are located. Websites that operate in this manner have become extremely popular since the advent of sites like EBay or uBid.com, because winning a quality product can be easier than the click of a mouse.
Another progression in the evolution of auctions has been in what is called "penny" auctions, which are also online. These involve users buying bids, where each bid increases the price of the auctioned merchandise one penny.
So it is easy to see that the history of auctions is not stagnant; they are ever changing to keep up with the demand of change in society. You might know the current history of auctioneering, but we want to show you a brief history of how it got started and how it grew to be what it is today.
Although they were practiced sparingly, auctions have been around since about 500 B.C.! In Babylon, women were put up for bidding to find a husband.
Each auction would start out with the most beautiful woman and would progress until the least attractive woman was sold off. Although it might sound odd, this practice was so common that it was illegal to sell a woman any other way!
This type of selling continued to have a small presence in Europe, being held during the reign of the Roman Empire, and in such countries as England and France. In England, it was a peculiar commonality to have "auctions by candle".
There were similar to regular bid-offs, but at the beginning of the sale a candle was lit in the room. Bidders would keep bidding higher and higher until the candle went out.
Whoever was the highest bidder as this happened won the goods. Bid-offs were also frequent in France starting at the end of the eighteenth century.
The French used buildings such as taverns or coffeehouses to sell art in a bidding style. Some became so popular that they were held daily and a catalog of the goods being sold was provided to anybody who wanted it.
As in the case of the French, they used unrelated buildings to hold bidding events. Many countries had auction houses, which were entirely devoted to the selling of goods.
The world's oldest, the Stockholm Auction House, was built in 1674. Other houses popped up all around the globe in the next several centuries.
The world's two largest bidding institutions as of today, Sotheby's and Christie's were both founded in the 1700s. They are still in operation along with several other companies that were founded in these times and still continue to go strong.
This peculiar style of selling eventually made its way over to the United States. During the American Civil War, a colonel of an army would hold a bid-off for local goods that were taken by an invading army.
Interestingly enough, this is why many auctioneers are sometimes called "colonels". From Europe and the United States, auctions have made a splash all over the world and continue to grow in popularity.
The advent of internet bid-offs will only make the world of auctioneering flourish even more. Who knows how they will be conducted in the next ten, twenty, or one hundred years!
by: Tommy Greene
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