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Thunder & Lightning. Henry Robinson Luce and Briton Hadden were great & good friends who had been to Hotchkiss School and Yale together, had been editors of their undergraduate papers, had been cub newspapermen. While reporters on the late Frank Munsey's Baltimore News, they conceived the newsmagazine idea and set out to found TIME.
Their pre-publication office was a room in an ancient two-story frame house on Manhattan's East 18th Street. Between their desks stood a large iron kettle—about the size and shape used by African cannibals for the boiling of missionaries.
They used it for discarded cigaret butts while they were occupied in writing the first TIME stories and drafting a circular with which they obtained the original subscribers.
After TIME began publishing they took turns editing and managing business affairs, each for a several months' period.
Young Editor Luce, tall, spare, blond, had a staccato voice, a staccato personality, an extraordinary power of concentration.
Anxious to extract every ounce of juice from every story, he would summon young writers before him, subject them to a fire of questions: "Who?" "What did he do?'' "What do you mean? . . ." "Why?"
Temperamentally, Harry Luce was TIME'S lightning; Brit Hadden its thunder. Young Editor Hadden, black-haired, bushy-browed and so nervous that he never sat still, always scowled at copy, generally from beneath a green eyeshade. Vexed by a stupid blunder* he would growl out loud, sometimes stamp his feet. Pleased by an apt phrase, he would vent a guffaw that apprised TIME'S writers that a new phrase had been canonized in TIME style. Disdainful of "gumchewers," he always chewed gum. Contemptuous of dead literature, he constantly held up Homer† as an example to TIME'S staff. Impatient of slow waiters, he disrupted many a staid restaurant by waving a napkin over his head to get attention. Generous, he would never lend a friend less than $5, said he was ashamed to ask for the return of a smaller sum.
Death came, as it must to all men, to Briton Hadden in 1929. Ill for two months with a streptococcus infection, he died on February 27—six years almost to the hour after he and Henry Luce had sent to press the first issue of the first newsmagazine.
He died of the same disease (endocarditis) as Lord Northcliffe, famed British publisher for whom he had a lifelong admiration. As a memorial to Briton Hadden, Editor Luce and his many other friends erected a handsome Gothic building on the Yale campus to house the Yale Daily News, of which he had been editor eight years before.
Some time before Editor Hadden's death, Editor Luce had been exploring new types of business stories—to improve TIME'S "Business & Finance" section. He found a field so vast and fertile it could produce many stories not appropriate for TIME'S limited space. Hence, in 1930, FORTUNE was founded. Again, a few years later, several years of experiment in improving TIME'S and FORTUNE'S illustrations led to the conclusion that pictures could lend point to words and words to pictures but one had to be dominant.
Hence, in 1936, LIFE.