92 years ago today, on March 3, 1923, Time magazine published its first issue. A copy cost 15 cents.
Here is the first cover. (There would be many more.)
Time magazine, March 3, 1923, Time website image
(In honor of the issue’s anniversary today, TIME is making access to the original magazine free for the day. Click here for more details.)
“….After graduating from Yale in 1920, Luce spent a year in England studying at Oxford before returning to the United States, where he took a job as a reporter alongside fellow Yale alum Britton Hadden. While working together, the two drew plans for an idea they had first discussed at Yale — a new type of weekly magazine that wouldn’t simply report the news, but would also interpret it for those who did not have the time, the energy or the knowledge to interpret it for themselves. Sensing what would become the country’s scarcest commodity, Luce named the magazine TIME, and designed it to be read in less than an hour.
‘It’ll never work,’ acclaimed journalist, editor and author H.L. Mencken told Luce before TIME’s launch. But the ambitious young man remained undaunted. He and Hadden amassed $86,000, and with a staff consisting only of themselves and three other full-time writers, they published the first issue of TIME on March 3, 1923.”
— “Henry Luce: The Man Who Shaped ‘The American Century’”
Entrepreneur, October 9, 2008
See Also:
“Luce and his Time machine” A review of Alan Brinkley’s biography about Henry Luce.
Boston Globe, May 4, 2010
Do you have two minutes for 90 years of history?
A couple of years ago Time produced the following video about their magazine covers:
