On 13 January 1888, 33 explorers, scientists, and adventurers crowded into a fancy club room in Washington D.C. They were a strange bunch - a banker, a mapmaker, a weather expert, a guy who studied beavers. They sat around tables piled with charts and journals and decided to form a society for 'the increase and diffusion of geographic knowledge.' That was a fancy way of saying they wanted to share the wonders of the world with everyone. They called themselves the National Geographic Society.
Nine months later they printed their first magazine. It was thin, brown, and almost no one read it. Then in 1899, a young inventor's son named Gilbert Grosvenor took over as editor and made a wild decision - he filled the pages with photographs. Big, gorgeous photographs. Eleven pictures of mysterious Tibet ran in one issue and the society's membership shot up overnight. The bright yellow border around the cover became one of the most recognisable frames in the world.
For more than 130 years the Society has bankrolled expeditions to places most people would never go - to the top of Everest with Barry Bishop, to the deepest ocean trench with Bob Ballard, to the bones of dinosaurs in the Gobi Desert, into the Titanic wreck with submersibles, and out into space with astronaut photographers. Today their photos, maps, and documentaries reach hundreds of millions of people, and a yellow rectangle still says one simple thing: there is more world to see.
