Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things (68 page)

Bell also encouraged his contributing authors to humanize their adventure stories, enabling the reader to participate vicariously in the hardships and exhilarations of exploration. Peary, Cook, Amundsen, Byrd, and Shackleton were just a few of the renowned explorers who wrote firsthand accounts of their harrowing adventures. The society contributed to many expeditions, and a grateful Byrd once wrote, “Other than the flag of my country, I know of no greater privilege than to carry the emblem of the National Geographic Society.” By 1908, pictures occupied more than half of the magazine’s eighty pages.

But what significantly transformed
National Geographic
and boosted its
popularity was the advent of color photographs and illustrations.

The first color pictures appeared in the November 1910 issue: thirty-nine bright and exotic images of Korea and China, most of them full-page. Reader response was so great that following issues featured color photo spreads of Japan and Russia, and colored drawings of birds, which became a staple of the magazine. It claimed many photographic innovations: the first flashlight photographs of wild animals in their natural habitats, the first pictures taken from the stratosphere, and the first natural-color photographs of undersea life. One of the most popular single issues appeared in March 1919. Titled “Mankind’s Best Friend,” it contained magnificent color illustrations of seventy-three breeds of dogs.

From readers’ admiring letters, the editors learned that while subscribers enjoyed studying the colorful dress of foreign peoples, they preferred even more the undress of bare-breasted natives in obscure parts of the globe. By 1950,
National Geographic
held a firm position among the top ten monthly periodicals in the world.

Scientific American
: 1845, New York

A shoemaker at age fifteen and an amateur fiddler, Rufus Porter was also a tireless inventor—of cameras, clocks, and clothes-washing machines. Somewhere between his experiments with an engine lathe and electroplating in the summer of 1845, the native New Yorker launched a slender weekly newspaper,
Scientific American
, devoted to new inventions, including many of his own. A year later, bored with his latest endeavor, Porter sold his paper for a few hundred dollars.

The purchasers, Orson Munn and Alfred Beach, immediately increased the weekly from four to eight pages and broadened its scope to include short articles on mechanical and technical subjects. In those early years,
Scientific American
virtually ignored the fields of biology, medicine, astronomy, and physics.

Many of its technical articles were futuristic, some solid, others fanciful. In 1849, for instance, the magazine prematurely heralded the advent of subway transportation. In “An Underground Railroad in Broadway,” the editors outlined plans for a subterranean tunnel to run the length of New York City’s Broadway, with “openings in stairways at every corner.” Since electric power was not yet a reality, the subway envisioned by the editors was quite different from today’s: “The cars, which are to be drawn by horses, will stop ten seconds at every corner, thus performing the trip up and down, including stoppages, in about an hour.”

When New York newspapers ridiculed the idea, editor Beach secured legislative approval to build instead an underground pneumatic tube system. In February 1870, workmen actually began digging a tunnel in lower Manhattan from Warren to Murray streets. As conceived, a car accommodating
eighteen passengers would fit snugly into the pneumatic tube. A compressed-air engine would blow it downtown, then, with the engine reversed, the car would be sucked uptown. Construction was still proceeding when the city’s government, convinced that some sort of subway was feasible and essential, announced plans for a five-million-dollar elevated steam train.

The magazine’s early contributors were among the greatest inventors of the period. Samuel Morse wrote about his dot-and-dash code, and Thomas Edison, who walked three miles to get his monthly copy of the journal, composed a feature in 1877 about his new “Talking Machine,” the phonograph. The magazine’s stated goal was “to impress the fact that science is not inherently dull, but essentially fascinating, understandable, and full of undeniable charm” —a goal that it achieved early in its history.

Life
: 1936, New York

In November 1936, after months of experimentation and promotion, Henry Luce’s
Life
magazine appeared on newsstands throughout the country. For a dime, a reader was entertained and enlightened by ninety-six pages of text and photographs: the first picture was of an obstetrician slapping a baby to consciousness and was captioned “Life Begins.” The issue sold out within hours, and customers clamored to add their names to dealers’ waiting lists for the next installment.

Although
Life
was the most successful picture magazine in history, it was not the first picture magazine, nor was it the first
Life
. Luce’s product took its name from a picture periodical that debuted in 1883, the creation of an illustrator named John Mitchell.

Mitchell graduated from Harvard College with a degree in science and studied architecture in Paris. In 1882, he settled in New York City and decided to start a “picture weekly” that would make use of a new zinc etching method of reproducing line drawings directly instead of having them first engraved on wood blocks. Mitchell’s
Life
was a magazine of humor and satire, and a showcase for many of his own comic illustrations. In its pages in 1877, Charles Dana Gibson, not yet twenty-one, introduced Americans to the serenely beautiful, self-reliant “Gibson Girl.” Until the Depression, Mitchell’s
Life
was one of America’s most successful ten-cent weeklies.

Enter Henry Luce.

In 1936, Luce was searching for a catchy title for his soon-to-be-launched photographic picture magazine—which at the time was tentatively named
Look
. Luce purchased the name
Life
from Mitchell’s illustrated humor magazine for $92,000.

Luce’s
Life
, relating the news in photographs, found an eager audience in the millions of Americans enthralled with motion pictures. Images, rather than text, were a new and graphic way to convey a story, and
Life’s
gutsy and artful pictures read like text. The magazine’s “picture essays” brought
to maturity the field of photojournalism. Within only a few weeks of its October 1936 debut,
Life
was selling a million copies an issue, making it one of the most successful periodicals in history.

Charles Dana Gibson’s “Gibson Girl” in
Life.

Look
: 1937, New York

Around the time Henry Luce was changing the proposed name of his picture magazine from
Look
to
Life
, newspaperman Gardner Cowles, Jr., was hard at work independently developing a similar periodical, to be called
Look. Look
, though, was no imitator of
Life
, nor were the magazines competitors—at first. In fact, Gardner Cowles and Henry Luce traded ideas on their projects. For a time, Luce was even an investor in
Look
.

Look
actually evolved from the Sunday picture section of the Des Moines, Iowa,
Register and Tribune
, a newspaper owned by the Cowles family since early in the century. In 1925, the paper surveyed its readers and discovered that they preferred pictures to text. Thus, the newspaper began running series of photographs that told a story instead of a single picture with text. These “picture stories” were so successful that in 1933 the
Register and Tribune
began syndicating them to twenty-six other newspapers. It was then that Cowles formulated plans for a picture magazine.

Although Gardner Cowles and Henry Luce agreed on the power of visual images, their early magazines were fundamentally different.
Life
, an “information” weekly, was printed on slick stock and emphasized news, the arts, and the sciences, with an occasional seasoning of sex.
Look
, first a monthly, then a biweekly, was printed on cheaper paper and focused on personalities, pets, foods, fashions, and photo quizzes. As
Look
matured, it
grew closer in concept to
Life
and the two magazines competed for readers—with each magazine finding enough loyal followers to keep it thriving and competing for many years.

Ebony
: 1945, Illinois

While
Look
and
Life
were top sellers, a new and significantly different American magazine appeared, capturing the readership of more than a quarter of the black adults in the country.

John Johnson, head of the Johnson Publishing Company, founded
Ebony
in 1945 specifically for black World War II veterans, who were returning home in large numbers. Johnson felt that these men, ready to marry and father children, needed wider knowledge of the world and could benefit from reading stories about successful blacks.

Johnson had already displayed a talent for persuading powerful whites to take him and his projects seriously. His first publishing venture had been a magazine called
Negro Digest
. He had raised the capital to launch that periodical, and when white magazine distributors refused to believe that a magazine for blacks could succeed, Johnson coaxed hundreds of his acquaintances to ask for the magazine at newsstands. And after several places agreed to stock
Negro Digest
on a trial basis, Johnson’s friends then purchased all the copies. Chicago’s white distributors, concluding that readership for a black magazine existed, welcomed Johnson’s digest. Within months, circulation of
Negro Digest
rose to fifty thousand, and in 1943, when the magazine was a year old, Johnson persuaded Eleanor Roosevelt to write an article titled “If I Were a Negro.” It generated so much publicity nationwide that before year’s end, the circulation of
Negro Digest
trebled.

With
Ebony
, the black readership was strong but white advertisers shied away from the magazine. Johnson’s breakthrough came with the Zenith Corporation. The electronics company’s president, Commander Eugene McDonald, had journeyed to the North Pole with Admiral Peary and a black explorer, Matthew Henson. When Johnson approached Commander McDonald, he displayed an issue of
Ebony
featuring a story about Henson and the Peary expedition. The commander’s nostalgia induced him to honor Johnson’s request, and Zenith’s advertisements in
Ebony
undermined the white wall of resistance. With
Ebony, Negro Digest
, and another publication,
Jet
, John Johnson captured a combined readership of twelve million, nearly half the black adults in America.

Esquire
: 1933, New York

The immediate inspiration for
Esquire
was a publication that debuted in October 1931,
Apparel Arts
, a handsome quarterly for the men’s clothing trade edited by Arnold Gingrich.
Apparel Arts
was popular but expensive;
Gingrich figured that American men might flock in large numbers to a version of the fashion magazine that could sell for a dime. He considered calling the spin-off
Trend, Stag
, or
Beau
. Then one day he glanced at an abbreviation in his attorney’s letterhead, “Esq.,” and had his title.

Gingrich felt certain that a market existed for
Esquire
because of reports from clothing stores that customers stole counter copies of
Apparel Arts
. It was customary for stores to display the thick quarterly, allowing customers to order from among its merchandise. Several East Coast stores had already asked Gingrich if he could produce an inexpensive, giveaway fashion brochure that customers could take home and browse through at leisure. Instead of a handout, Gingrich conceived of the ten-cent
Esquire
, and he prepared a dummy copy by cutting and pasting pictures and articles from back issues of its parent,
Apparel Arts
.

The first issue of
Esquire
, in October 1933, was an attractive, glossy quarterly of 116 pages, one third of them in color, but costing fifty cents. Although industry experts had predicted that a men’s fashion magazine could sell no more than 25,000 copies, clothing stores alone ordered 100,000 copies of the initial issue; Gingrich immediately decided to make the magazine a monthly.

In addition to fashion, the premier issue included articles, short stories, and sports pieces bearing impressive bylines: Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Dashiell Hammett, and Gene Tunney. And
Esquire
continued as a magazine of fashion and literary distinction, featuring writings by Thomas Mann, D. H. Lawrence, André Maurois, and Thomas Wolfe. Hemingway first published “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” in its pages, F. Scott Fitzgerald contributed original stories, Arthur Miller wrote “The Misfits” for the magazine, which also introduced new plays by William Inge and Tennessee Williams. By 1960, the magazine that had been conceived as a free clothing store handout was generating yearly advertising revenue in excess of seven million dollars and had a circulation of almost a million. One can only speculate on its success had Arnold Gingrich called it
Stag
.