Happy 100, National Geographic

By Dick Thompson/Washington

In the beginning, there was stodginess. When the 33 charter members of the National Geographic Society first met on Jan. 13, 1888, at Washington's musty Cosmos Club, their mission was to spur the "increase and diffusion of geographic knowledge." The hidebound organization founded by these scientists, bankers, lawyers and educators allowed "gifts to natives" as legitimate expenses; it waited until 1964 before permitting men and women to eat together in its main cafeteria. Still, the society's flagship, the yellow- bordered National Geographic magazine, which is now distributed in 167 countries, eventually came to rival Mom and apple pie as an American icon. Before skin flicks and magazines became commonplace, National Geographic offered generations of boys their first opportunity to ogle bare-breasted women -- though the breasts were almost always African or Asian, rarely Caucasian. Even today the magazine is squirreled away each month like precious treasure by many of the society's 10.5 million members, who boast floor- sagging collections and trade back copies until they are tattered.

For all its hoary ways, however, the National Geographic Society has been a noteworthy force in scientific innovation. As it prepares to celebrate its 100th anniversary with a centennial issue of the magazine, scientific symposiums and special exhibits in Washington, it can look back on a distinguished record of accomplishment. Since 1890 it has helped fund some 3,300 research projects and expeditions, from Commander Robert Peary's 1909 trek to the North Pole to Marine Geologist Robert Ballard's 1986 exploration of the wreck of the Titanic. The society was the first American publisher to set up a color photo lab (1920), the first to feature underwater color photographs (1927), and the first to print a hologram, or three-dimensional photograph (1984).

National Geographic maps have long set the standard for cartography. They are so accurate that Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill reportedly followed the progress of World War II on them. Under the direction of Chief Cartographer John B. Garver Jr., the map department entered the computer age in 1983 with the acquisition of a specialized computer that enables mapmakers to modify roads, rivers, borders and country names without wholesale revision. Subscribers now receive six poster-size maps a year, each produced by the society's 130 researchers and mapmakers at a cost of $1 million.

True to its charter, the society is also developing educational video disks, and has produced a board game, Global Pursuit, as part of a ten-year program to restore geographic literacy to U.S. schoolchildren. Its steady output of adventure and scientific programming for television will reach more than 100 hours next year. Says C.D.B. Bryan, author of the centennial volume, The National Geographic Society: 100 Years of Adventure and Discovery (Abrams; $45): "The National Geographic is not at all what we remember. It's not the old lady it used to be."

The society's second president, Alexander Graham Bell, who in 1898 succeeded his father-in-law Gardiner Greene Hubbard, set the tone for the enterprise by declaring, "The world and all that is in it is our theme." When Bell hired his future son-in-law, a schoolteacher named Gilbert Hovey Grosvenor, 23, to run the magazine in 1899, the young man catered to snob appeal by soliciting "nominations for membership" instead of subscriptions. The device eventually created the largest nonselective society in the world. Grosvenor's grandson Gil now serves as president of the nonprofit society, which last year showed an estimated $370 million in revenues.

The magazine pioneered the use of photographs to take its members vicariously to the most remote corners of the earth. The society was not above using a little clout to get its photos. In 1905 it published 138 pictures of ; the Philippines that were so popular the magazine had to go to a second printing. Source of the pictures: a U.S. War Department report, courtesy of Secretary of War William Howard Taft, who happened to be Editor Grosvenor's cousin. On occasion, National Geographic has not let verisimilitude stand in the way of a good picture either. Editors laying out the February 1982 cover on Napoleon's life and campaigns used a computer to shift the position of one of the Egyptian pyramids in a photograph so it would fit better within the cover's format. The magazine's content has also been marred by political naivete. Perhaps the most distressing instance: a glowing feature on Hitler's Germany that was published in 1937, on the eve of World War II.

Despite such embarrassments, the society's real achievement has been to bring the world and the marvels of scientific discovery to its readers, who for years have followed the adventures of such favorites as French Undersea Explorer Jacques-Yves Cousteau and Chimpanzee Expert Jane Goodall. Says Paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey, another society beneficiary: "The Geographic's foundation funding has contributed more than any other organization in bringing about an understanding of early man." The magazine's greatest strength is the exceptional sense of intimacy it shares with its readers, as well as its simple, first-person style. 60 Minutes Correspondent Morley Safer habitually packs issues of the magazine whenever he heads off to unfamiliar parts of the globe. Says he: "If it's somewhere you've never been to before, National Geographic can be pure gold -- just to get a sniff of the place."