Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things

by Charles Panati

  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.

  Reader’s Digest: 1922, New York

  The son of a Presbyterian minister from St. Paul, Minnesota, DeWitt Wallace had an idea for a small family digest that might at best earn him five thousand dollars a year. He believed that people wished to be well informed, but that no reader in 1920 had the time or money to read the scores of magazines issued weekly. Wallace proposed to sift out the most noteworthy articles, condense them for easy reading, and gather them into a handy periodical the size of a novella.

  From back issues of other magazines, Wallace prepared his dummy. Two hundred copies of the prototype, already named Reader’s Digest, were mailed to New York publishers and other potential backers. No one expressed the least interest. So Wallace and his fiancée, Lila Bell Acheson, the daughter of another Presbyterian minister, rented an office in New York’s Greenwich Village and formed the Reader’s Digest Association. They condensed magazine articles, and prepared a mimeographed circular soliciting subscriptions, which they mailed to several thousand people on their wedding day, October 15, 1921. When they returned from their honeymoon two weeks later, the Wallaces found they had fifteen hundred charter subscribers at three dollars each. They then set to work on issue number one of Reader’s Digest, dated February 1922.

  With success came an unanticipated problem.

  At first, other magazines readily granted the Digest permission to reprint articles without fees. It was publicity. But as circulation increased, the Digest was suddenly viewed as a competitor, cannibalizing copy and cutting into advertising revenue and readership. Soon many of the country’s major magazines refused the Wallaces reprint rights.

  In 1933, to maintain the appearance of a digest, DeWitt Wallace instituted a controversial practice. He commissioned and paid for original articles to be written for other magazines, with the proviso that he be permitted to publish excerpts. Critics lambasted them as “planted articles,” while Wallace more benignly called them “cooperatively planned.” Magazines with small budgets welcomed the articles, but larger publications accused Wallace of threatening the free flow of ideas and determining the content of too many publications. The practice was discontinued in the 1950s. By that time, the wholesome family digest that praised a life of neighborliness and good works was earning thirty million dollars a year, and had recently launched a new venture, the Reader’s Digest Condensed Book Club. In the next decade, its circulation would climb to fifteen million readers.

  TV Guide: 1953, Pennsylvania

  The magazine that would achieve a weekly circulation of seventeen million readers and change the way Americans watched television was born out of a telephone conversation.

  In November 1952, Merrill Panitt, a television columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer and an administrative assistant at Triangle Publications, received a phone call from his employer at Triangle, Walter H. Annenberg. The influential businessman had spotted a newspaper advertisement for a new weekly magazine, TV Digest. Annenberg instructed Panitt to learn more about the proposed publication and discover if there were any others like it around the country. Before that phone call was concluded, Annenberg had convinced himself to publish a national television magazine with local program listings. By the time he had hung up, he had laid out in principle what was to become one of America’s top-selling periodicals.

  Panitt learned that local television magazines existed in at least New York City, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Annenberg moved quickly to acquire these publications, while contemplating what to name his own venture.

  Panitt began the work of assembling a national editorial staff. Since there was no reservoir of stories or photos to fall back on, assignments were issued quickly. Red Smith, later to win a Pulitzer Prize, was hired to contribute a regular sports column.

  At the Philadelphia headquarters, the editors had no trouble in deciding whom to put on their first cover. There had never been a television show as popular as I Love Lucy. It was a national phenomenon. President Eisenhower delayed an address to the nation rather than run against Lucy, and since the show aired on the night America’s department stores remained opened till nine-thirty, stores across the country installed television sets, hoping to win back shoppers who were staying home by the tens of thousands rather than miss their favorite program. Since the entire country had followed Lucy’s pregnancy and her baby’s birth on television, the editors decided to highlight the baby, Desidero Alberto Arnaz IV, and to place Lucy’s familiar face in the magazine’s upper-right-hand corner.

  TV Guide made its debut in April 1953, in ten different editions, with regional program listings. Although th
at first issue was a resounding success, weekly circulation began a strange and unanticipated decline. No one at the new publication had taken into account a social practice of the ’50s: With the majority of American homes lacking air-conditioning, television viewing declined precipitously in the summer months, while families opted for outdoor recreation, even if it was only to rock on the front porch to catch a breeze.

  With the approach of fall, the circulation of TV Guide rose steadily, and the editors made an innovative move in devoting one issue to the shows scheduled for the new 1953–54 season. That first Fall Preview Issue sold out at newsstands and supermarkets and started a tradition. In fact, the annual Fall Preview quickly became TV Guide’s biggest issue in advertising revenue and circulation. Today, headquartered in Radnor, Pennsylvania, the magazine publishes 108 local editions, covering every state but Alaska.

  Time: 1923, New York

  Almost titled Chance or Destiny, the most popular news weekly in the history of publishing, Time, sprang out of a close collegiate friendship between two extraordinarily different men.

  Briton Hadden, born in Brooklyn in 1898 of well-to-do parents, had shown an interest in journalism since childhood, when he entertained his family with poems and stories and his classmates with a newspaper, the Daily Glonk. He secured his first professional writing position, with the New York World, after informing its editor, who had tried to dismiss him, “You’re interfering with my destiny.”

  Whereas Hadden was extroverted and prankish, Henry Luce was serious and pragmatic. He was the son of a Presbyterian missionary who had founded two American universities in China, where Luce was born. Family members were required to spend at least an hour a day in some effort that benefited mankind.