A small cadre of businessmen, explorers, scientists, and scholars incorporates the National Geographic Society.
What began as a small, elite society for “the increase and diffusion of geographic knowledge” is now one of the world’s largest nonprofit scientific and educational institutions. Its mission today is broader: “to inspire people to care about the planet.” Founding president Gardiner Green Hubbard was the father-in-law and early financial backer of inventor Alexander Graham Bell (see here), another founding member and the society’s second president. The society’s National Geographic magazine first appeared just nine months after that founding meeting. It started as a drab scholarly journal sent to 165 charter members.
National Geographic’s hallmark photojournalism began as an editor’s desperate attempt to fill eleven blank pages of the January 1905 issue before it went to press. Gilbert Grosvenor gambled with a photo spread on Lhasa, Tibet. Members loved it. National Geographic has been a constant pioneer in photojournalism, photographic technology, and color printing. It was the first U.S. publication to establish a color-photo lab (in 1920), first to publish color underwater photographs (in 1927), first to print an all-color issue (in 1962), and first to print a hologram (in 1984).
Membership revenue has provided funding for more than nine thousand grants for research and exploration, including Robert Peary’s expedition to the North Pole, Hiram Bingham’s excavation of Machu Picchu, Jacques-Yves Cousteau’s underwater exploration (see here), Louis and Mary Leakey’s research on human evolution in Africa, and Dian Fossey’s and Jane Goodall’s studies of gorillas and chimpanzees, respectively. The society’s yellow-bordered flagship publication is published in thirty-two languages and sent to eight million subscribers worldwide. NGS also produces films, books, DVDs, music, and games; runs a website; and has a television channel that reaches 270 million households in 166 countries.
That’s increase and diffusion for you.—AA