Joseph Nathan Kane - Career

Career

Kane was first an editor for Academic Herald at Townsend Harris. There he interviewed many important people including John Wanamaker. Later he worked for the Jewish Press where he interviewed prominent people like H. G. Wells, Lord Balfour and Vicente Blasco-Ibanez. Kane then began working at confectionery manager D. Auerbach & Sons of New York City at the end of the First World War as their export department manager. They took advantage of Kane's knowledge of world geography, world currency, and his language abilities in French, German, and Spanish. He worked for Auerbach for only a year and then moved to Universal Export Corporation as their export manager for two years.

Kane began writing monthly articles on export matters and created Kane Feature News Syndicate about 1920. For some 20 years he syndicated hundreds of articles to more than twenty publications. Among his clients were the New York Times, American Hebrew, Underwear and Hosiery Review, Advertising Age, Cracker Baker, American Magazine, Printers' Ink, Nation's Business, National Costumer, American Hatter, Fur Age, and Playthings. He additionally sold his articles to Exporters' Digest and International Trade Review where he was editor for several years.

Kane received a handsome amount from Simon & Schuster in 1921 to write a book on the history of inventions. He was to write on things like the Wright brothers and their first aeroplane, Thomas Edison and his electric light bulb invention, Alexander Graham Bell and the telephone, and Samuel F. B. Morse's invention of the telegraph. Starting in 1922 and lasting until 1932, Kane spent about eleven months out of every year traveling around the United States as a freelance, self-syndicated journalist. Kane sought out who invented what in the United States. He did much research on this project only to realize that often a lot of people appeared responsible for the same invention.

In the late 1920s Kane decided to write a book on the achievers of "firsts" whom history had forgotten. He limited his scope of establishing "firsts" to the United States where he could find proof of the claims in recorded documents. In his travels throughout the states Kane gathered information from historical societies, used-book stores, museums and libraries. He researched through recorded public documents in state and county records. Kane sought information from sales records, newspaper files, and filed patents. Additionally he obtained information from government departments and private organizations.