Read "The Clock that Had no Hands" by Herbert Kaufman online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
Half a century ago there were ten million acres of land, within a thousand miles of Chicago, upon which not even a blade of grass would grow. Today upon these very deserts are wonderful orchards and tremendous wheatfields. "The soil itself was full of possibilities. What the land needed was water." In time there came farmers who knew that they could not expect the streams "to come to them", and so they dug ditches and "led the water to their properties" from the surrounding rivers and lakes; they tilled the earth with their "brains" as well as their "plows" -- they became rich through "irrigation".
Advertising has made thousands of men rich, just because they recognized the possibilities of utilizing the newspapers to bring streams of buyers into neighborhoods that could be made busy locations by irrigation -- "by drawing people from other sections".