This Week in History: The beginnings of the National Geographic Society
- Antone Pierucci
- Posted On
Author’s note: I've truly enjoyed sharing with you readers all the interesting and varied stories from our past. However, my career as a public historian is taking me in another direction one that will not afford me as much leisure time to write. This is my final "This Week in History." I hope you enjoy it.
I have no doubt that some magazines survive solely on the subscriptions made from doctors and dentists. I think you would be hard pressed to find a copy of Time magazine or Good Housekeeping outside the confines of a waiting room.
But then again, maybe I just don’t pay attention to magazines. I’ve never been an aficionado of that particular media – and who can blame me? I once bought a subscription to The Economist. Within two months of receiving the weekly magazine, I was drowning in issues – they were scattered on my kitchen counter, stuffed between the cushions of my couch and piling high on my bedroom nightstand. It’s as if the damn things duplicated themselves.
Within six months I was finding issues I swear I had never seen before, let alone read. It’s been a year since my subscription lapsed and I am still finding issues in the oddest places (why did I bring the magazine to my cubicle at work?).
If for no other reason than the wanton waste of all that paper, I’ve sworn off the things. I’ll find my news in more environmentally friendly formats, thank you very much.
With one exception: National Geographic.
Those thick tomes are crammed with photographs and articles that transport readers to the most exotic places in the world, and introduces them to people of all walks of life. You can easily spot these magazines among the piles in the waiting room; just look for the iconic gold border on the front cover.
I’ve never picked up an issue of the magazine that I didn’t find engrossing. Even though we’re inundated with images every second of the day, the photographs published in the magazine are somehow more arresting, more real than the ones found online or TV.
The stories, too, are somehow fresh and always just detailed enough to satiate the appetite without gorging the reader with information. National Geographic has hit the right mix of educated, detailed reporting with easily digestible stories and engaging eye candy.
But it wasn’t always so. In fact, when the first National Geographic issue was published in 1888, it was met with a lukewarm response at best.
The National Geographic Society itself had only been established nine months before on Jan. 27 in Washington D.C. On that day, 33 men from throughout the country convened to create an institution for “the increase and diffusion of geographical knowledge.”
Americans were discovering a sudden interest in the natural beauty of the great outdoors. The opening of the west and the discovery of such awe-inspiring natural resources as the Grand Canyon had sparked this newfound interest.
The growth of American capitalism and the arrival of the country on the international stage expanded the scope of that interest. More and more Americans were interested in the world around them, not just in their own backyard.
The 33 men who met that day in 1888 came from a variety of backgrounds. There were financiers from Wall Street; professors fresh from university lecture halls; explorers still dusty from their latest trek and, of course, geographers. Recognizing the difficulty of establishing a national organization with such a universal scope, the National Geographic Society elected as its first president philanthropist and lawyer Gardiner Greene Hubbard.
Hubbard was an interesting character. Although a career lawyer (he became a justice of the Massachusetts State Supreme Court), his more interesting pursuits involved working to establish the Bell Telephone Co. with his soon-to-be son-in-law Alexander Graham Bell. He also helped finance Edison’s phonograph company and, later, Bell’s competing company, Volta Phonograph Co., which would later evolved into Columbia Records.
It was likely his long history of successful financing ventures that led the NGS to elect him president. Although Greene was successful in nurturing the infant organization in its earliest years, the organization’s publication, National Geographic magazine, was never able to flourish under his reign.
All of this changed when Gilbert H. Grosvenor became editor. Within a few years of taking over editorship of the magazine in 1899, Grosvenor increased circulation from 1,000 to more than two million.
By axing the overly technical articles and redoing the format entirely, he turned the magazine into the popular magazine it is today – at least he started it on that path.
With the revenue made from magazine subscriptions, the NGS was able to fund explorations around the world, including early trail-blazing explorations of the north and south poles. More than a hundred years later, the National Geographic Society continues to fund research projects.
It also keeps publishing its famous magazine – one that is worth subscribing to, inevitable clutter be damned.
Antone Pierucci is curator of history at the Riverside County Park and Open Space District and a freelance writer whose work has been featured in such magazines as Archaeology and Wild West as well as regional California newspapers.