SCIENCE AND INVENTION," said the original prospectus for TIME, written 40 years ago, "will contain a special column on 'Radio' in which the latest activities and developments in that branch of science will be chronicled by a radio expert in terms that a novice can understand."
That is a reminder of how long ago it was, and how much has happened on earth and in space since then.
But then there was another part of the prospectus, in which the two young men who were daring to launch this experiment considered brash and unrealistic by most journalists and businessmen who heard about itlisted some of the things that "WE VIEW WITH ALARM." One of them: "The tendency of the Russian Soviet delegation to start rows at Genoa."
And that suggests what a short time ago it was, and how so many things are the same.
This is the kind of thoughts we are having at TIME this week as we publish what we have designated as our 40th Anniversary Issue*how much different, and how much the same, we are today from what Founders Henry R. Luce and Briton Hadden planned four decades ago.
They held the opinion that the people of America were for the most part poorly informed "because no publication has adapted itself to the time which busy men are able to spend on simply keeping informed," and they decided to invent that publication. To serve their high purpose, they had to sell their invention and make it an operating success. It was not easy. "In order to start TIME, we had to peddle stock to our friends and our friends' friends," Harry Luce recalled last week in the McKinsey Foundation Lecture at Columbia University. "We sold themwhen we did, and our sales were agonizingly few and far betweenon a sporting chance. We honestly believed, not without some evidence, that TIME would succeed. But of course the chance was one in ten, so they were putting their money on a ten-to-one shot."
One prospect who did not want to take so long a shot wrote recently about our anniversary. "It is hard for me to realize that 40 years have passed since the first little issue of TIME appeared," said John Cowles, president of the Minneapolis Star and Tribune. "My judgment has never been worse than when Roy Larsen told me about the concept of TIME and said he was leaving the New York Trust Company to become its circulation manager, and I told him that TIME didn't have a chance of succeeding, and that if he wanted to get into publishing he ought to join me on the Des Moines Register and Tribune! He tried to persuade me to buy a few thousand dollars worth of stock, and I turned him down!"
As it turned out, the proposition was quite a bit better than ten to one. Started with capital of $86,000, TIME became Time Inc., spread to include LIFE, FORTUNE, ARCHITECTURAL FORUM, HOUSE & HOME, SPORTS ILLUSTRATED, and other enterprises, with total assets of $262 million and gross revenues last year of $326 million. That is how much TIME has changed financially.