Business card

The practice traveled to seventeenth-century France, where visiting cards, called cartes de visite, circulated among aristocratic families to announce social calls. Elaborate rules governed their use. The way a card was folded communicated specific messages, and presenting a card to a household that had not received prior notice was considered a serious breach of etiquette. Louis XIV's court refined the practice into a system of social regulation.

In seventeenth-century London, a parallel invention emerged. Trade cards served a commercial function, carrying a business's name and a map to its location on the reverse side, because most streets at the time lacked formal addresses or numbering systems. These cards were not about social standing. They were about making a business findable in a city where getting lost was the norm.

By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the social visiting card and the commercial trade card merged. Advances in printing, from copperplate engraving to lithography, made production cheaper and more elaborate. The business card as a combined social and professional instrument became standard across Europe and North America. Victorian etiquette manuals devoted entire chapters to the proper handling of cards, treating them as indices of character and class.

By the early twentieth century, the business card had shed most of its aristocratic formality and become a fixture of commercial life, carried by salespeople, managers, and professionals as a portable summary of professional identity.