How National Geographic’s Yellow Border Became A Global Icon

Thirty-three men gathered at Washington’s Cosmos Club, a sort of social club for scientists and professionals, on January 13, 1888, to found a new organization that was formally incorporated two weeks later. The organization blended cartographers and military officers with lawyers and rich financiers, not professional geographers. They chose Gardiner Greene Hubbard, a Boston lawyer and financier and the first president of the Bell Telephone Company, as the Society’s first leader. Its purpose: “the increase and diffusion of geographical knowledge.”

On September 22, 1888, the journal was mailed to its 165 charter members, bound in plain terracotta-brown paper and featuring surveys from the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey. For nearly ten years, the publication struggled to find readers beyond its small circle of scientific subscribers. It lacked photographs and color, and it had no bright yellow border. It was a technical pamphlet, not a magazine someone outside of the club would pick up off the stand.

Hubbard’s son-in-law, the telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell, became the Society’s second president in January 1898, after Hubbard’s death the previous year. Bell also spoke out against geography being described as a narrow field and argued that the discipline should encompass “the world and all that is in it.” A growing demand for maps among the American public during the Spanish-American War of 1898 encouraged Bell’s push for a more broadly readable magazine.

Bell hired Grosvenor, then 23, in the late 1890s as the magazine’s first full-time employee. Grosvenor would later marry Bell’s daughter, Elsie May Bell. To solve the Society’s money troubles, the two worked out a new plan: rather than selling individual issues, people paid $2.00 or more per year in dues to become “members” and get the magazine as a perk. This model would go on to underwrite the Society’s operations for generations.

But in 1904, Grosvenor’s yearning for simplicity and photos would put him on a collision course with several of the Board of Managers who preferred a research publication with more technical content. In that year, a group of geographers, led by William Morris Davis of Harvard University, founded an independent technical research organization. None of the departing scientists harbored ill feelings; they simply wanted to have their own venue for publication. With this split, Grosvenor could now pursue his vision of a picture-rich, general interest magazine.

The magazine’s editor was Gilbert Hovey Grosvenor, then 29. With 11 empty pages to fill and nothing to put in them, he received an unsolicited package of photos from Lhasa, the Tibetan city that was off-limits to nearly all foreigners. The photos were shot by two Russian-Buryat explorers, Gombojab Tsybikov and Ovshe Norzunov. Grosvenor filled the void with an 11-page photo spread and very little copy. He recalled that he was sure he would be fired for running so many photos. The members, though, loved it.

George Shiras III, a lawyer known as “Grandfather Flash,” rigged magnesium flash-powder tripwires to take pictures of wild animals by night in Michigan. When editor Gilbert Hovey Grosvenor printed 74 of those photos in July 1906, two conservative board members, one of them the geologist Alfred H. Brooks, resigned in protest. The magazine was becoming, they charged, a “picture book.” But readers demanded reprints; the Society had not produced enough.

In 1908, the Society awarded $10,000 to Robert E. Peary, a Naval officer in the U.S. Civil Engineer Corps and a polar explorer, to seek the North Pole, granting the Society full reporting rights. Peary returned in 1909 claiming he reached the Pole on April 6, 1909. A review of his logbooks by a Society committee found the expedition reached the Pole, and he received the Society’s Hubbard Medal. However, recent analysis suggests he might not have reached the precise point due to ice drift and mathematical error.

By 1910, National Geographic was already a successful photo-driven magazine, and editor Grosvenor wanted it to stand out instantly on crowded newsstands. That year, the cover got a redesign featuring a dull yellow border with an intricate oak leaf and acorn pattern surrounding the table of contents, not at all like the iconic yellow rectangle today. The design was gradually pared down over subsequent years until it reached its current form.

In 1911, Yale historian Hiram Bingham III employed Quechua farmers, including one named Melchor Arteaga, as his guides, and uncovered the site of Machu Picchu in the Peruvian Andes. The site, though, was already well-known to Arteaga and others in the area. National Geographic devoted its entire April 1913 issue, titled “In the Wonderland of Peru,” to the Bingham dig. The issue featured more than 200 photos and marked one of the magazine’s first single-topic issues.

National Geographic ran its first natural-color photograph in July 1914: a flower garden in Ghent, Belgium, photographed by Paul Guillumette. It was produced using the Lumière brothers’ Autochrome process, which was based on a layer of tiny, dyed potato-starch grains coated on glass plates that captured true color without any subsequent painting. Editor Gilbert Hovey Grosvenor vowed that the magazine would use color photography from then on. He went on to amass a collection of more than 14,000 glass Autochrome plates.

One of the most obvious problems with using standard magnetic compasses near either pole is that they spin in useless circles. To combat this, the Society’s Chief Cartographer, Albert H. Bumstead, who headed its newly created Cartographic Division, developed a fix called the Bumstead Sun Compass. Using the shadow of a gnomon and clockwork gears to determine true heading, the sun compass didn’t use any magnetism whatsoever. This innovation would eventually be relied upon by aviator Richard E. Byrd on his flights to both poles.

In 1920, the society published seven rules for its editors, written by Gilbert Hovey Grosvenor, who was then the society’s president. The rules dictated that the magazine be accurate, not take sides on “partisan” issues, and print “only what is of a kindly nature” about other countries. This relentlessly positive tone enabled the society to steadily increase its membership over a period of decades, yet some historians have accused the society of being too shallow in its coverage of international conflict and political strife.

William Longley, a marine biologist, wanted to take the world’s first natural-color underwater pictures. He worked with Charles Martin, head of the photo lab, using the slow-exposure Autochrome glass plates. Because the bottom of the sea wasn’t bright enough for these plates, Longley and Martin detonated one-pound charges of magnesium flash powder from a raft above, timing the explosions electrically with submerged cameras. The pictures were published in January 1927. The lead photo shows a hogfish that is as brightly colored as you can imagine. It was taken off Florida’s Dry Tortugas in the summer of 1926.

The Society gave polar aviator Richard E. Byrd more than $50,000, a full complement of cold-weather gear, and aerial maps in the late 1920s for his Antarctic flight. With a plane he called the Floyd Bennett, Byrd and his crew departed from their base camp, and with a Bumstead sun compass, they flew to the South Pole and returned. They dropped a weighted American flag on the way out, then came home without incident.

In the early 1930s, naturalist William Beebe and engineer Otis Barton, who designed their vessel, spent much of their time descending into the deep sea off Bermuda in a cast-iron sphere called the bathysphere suspended by a steel wire. In the summer of 1934, the pair hit a then-record depth of more than 3,000 feet. Beebe telephoned descriptions of bioluminescent animals he spotted through the sphere’s thick quartz windows to artists waiting at the surface. The two men were brought back up safely.

On November 11, 1935, Captains Albert W. Stevens and Orvil A. Anderson launched a helium-filled balloon called the Explorer II from a spot outside Rapid City, South Dakota. They flew up to a record-breaking 72,395 feet (more than 13 miles high), inside a pressurized magnesium gondola. At this altitude, Stevens took the first photograph showing the curve of the Earth, shot on black-and-white infrared film, not color. Both men landed safely.

During World War II, following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the Society’s Cartographic Division, headed by its chief cartographer, Wellman Chamberlin, worked around the clock, producing over 30 million top-quality maps for the United States Armed Forces. General Dwight D. Eisenhower carried the Society’s theater maps with him in his mobile headquarters, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt had a special Society map cabinet constructed for the White House.

The first research grant given by the Society in 1952 went to Jacques-Yves Cousteau, a French naval officer and one of the inventors of the Aqua-Lung. This money funded his underwater research vessel, the Calypso, and work with Harold “Doc” Edgerton, an engineer whose equipment allowed the camera to take stills at great depths. National Geographic immediately published Cousteau’s first major color undersea feature story. Gilbert Hovey Grosvenor, who had been running the magazine for 55 years, retired in 1954, becoming board chairman. He was replaced as editor-in-chief by long-time associate editor John Oliver La Gorce, who remained in the post until he was succeeded by Melville Bell Grosvenor, son of Gilbert H. Grosvenor.

On July 17, 1959, Mary Leakey discovered the fossilized skull of a 1.75-million-year-old hominin known as Nutcracker Man in Olduvai Gorge, located in modern-day Tanzania. Her husband Louis was recovering from an illness at the campsite when she made the find. The Society provided the project with financial backing and technical support, and its media presence propelled the field of paleoanthropology into mainstream consciousness. In July of that year, National Geographic broke decades of text-only covers with a color photo of the admission of Alaska to the Union.

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