The National Geographic Society [antikvár]

Introduction Writing this book could not have been anything but fun. To have the opportunity to explore nearly one hundred years of the National Geographic Society's history is like becoming a child again—a child who, confined indoors on a languorous, rainy, endless summer afternoon, discovers in the attic of a rented beach cottage the elaborate illustrated family albums of a somewhat eccentric, always fascinating, and truly remarkable clan. Since its founding in 1888, the Society has been offering "a window on the world" to millions of its members. Before color photography, before movies and television, the familiar National Geographic Magazine provided—through riveting eyewitness accounts and dazzling photographs—the primary means by which generations of armchair explorers first discovered the distant wonders, exotic customs, and strange people throughout our world. A century of exploding scientific knowledge and expanding ecological awareness is reflected in the pages of the JVIagazine, as are a hundred years of American intellectual curiosity and the Society's sometimes rose-colored political attitudes and reporting. Books, articles, and films disseminate the results of diverse scientific researches. And its Explorers Hall displays its heroes' memorabilia. What are five-score years of the Society's journal but nearly twenty-dozen memory-crowded scrapbooks in which stirring adventures, awesome disasters, breakthrough discoveries, and daring explorations have been carefully recorded? How can one not feel affection for a Society that has played so significant a role in the dreams of so many millions? Where else but in the pages of the Geographic might one read the entirely serious late-nineteenth-century report of a man who proposed attaching hydrogen-inflated balloons to himself so that he might bound across the frozen Arctic wastes to reach the North Pole? Where else but at the Society could one browse unrestrained through the correspondence of one of this nation's legendary editors—Gilbert Hovey Grosvenor—and discover that two of his Salem forebears had been hanged as witches? Or learn that a French Ambassador had awarded him the Legion of Honor for having done so much to "vulgarize geography" ? Or find such a gem of dismissal as this terse Grosvenor note written in 1930 to an editor about a man seeking Society support: "Mr. Graves, this man is a windbag! He can Opposite: Bradford and Barbara Washburn map the heart of Grand Canyon, a monumental seven-year task completed in 1970.