Fifteen years ago this week the first issue of TIME was mailed to 9,000 subscribers. This week over 700,000 families will read this 782nd issue of TIME—and by their request some 375,000 of their friends as well. Bound with the issue, as a special supplement, is a facsimile copy of Vol. 1 No. 1.
The Editors of TIME believe in the U. S. tradition of celebrating a birthday by doing a good day's work. Thus the 782nd issue of TIME, like the first, is dedicated solely to an attempt to keep intelligent people well informed. But even working editors cannot be wholly unconscious of anniversaries, and TIME'S have chosen to celebrate by printing their first story about themselves. To get it on paper, the Editors asked one of their oldest members to turn historian.
What he has written has not been edited by his associates and, un-TIME-like, it makes no claim to being disinterested.
Fifteen Years
In the last week of February 1923, a handful of young men, none more than three years out of college, were frantically putting together the first issue of the first newsmagazine. A few days earlier someone had remembered that a magazine must have a cover, and an artist had been commissioned to design one. He submitted only a rough sketch. On both sides of a portrait there was to be an elaborate arrangement of sundials, hourglasses, other time-symbols. To suggest the general idea, the artist had sketched in some "spinach." Uncertain about the symbols, the editors decided to use the spinach as a stopgap. Except for minor alterations and the addition of a red border in 1927, TIME'S cover has remained unchanged.
Within the magazine, changes have been plentiful. Since photographs were a major expense, the first issue had only eleven cuts, five of them pencil sketches. In the seventh issue the department of "Finance" became "Business & Finance." "Crime" became a subdivision of "National Affairs" (1925); "Aeronautics" part of a new department, "Transport" (1934). So many people objected to having words put into their mouths (although the facts reported were true) that "Imaginary Interviews" was eliminated in 1924; two years later "People" replaced it. Two departments in the first issue, "Point with Pride" and "View with Alarm," were the nearest TIME ever came to having an editorial page. Inconsistent with a disinterested editorial policy, both were abandoned in 1926.
In 1923 the U. S. was still emerging from the propaganda-filled atmosphere of War days, young TIME was a breath of untainted fresh air. Even the first issues, curious as they are to look back on, brought an influx of letters from readers who—surprisingly to the editors—said they were already devoted to TIME. They harped on the fact that they read it from "cover to cover" (see p. 4). One of the first to use the phrase was Dr. Henry Sloane Coffin. Among the other early enthusiasts famous enough to turn young editors' heads were Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Van Dyke, Newton D. Baker, Mrs. Elizabeth Marbury, Thomas Edison, Archbishop Michael J. Curley, Bernard Baruch, Mrs. John D. Rockefeller, Joseph Hergesheimer, Henry Ford, Elbert H. Gary, Herbert B. Swope.