an extra press run was required to meet demand.
The year started with 3,400 members for the
society, but by December 1905 there were 11,000.
Grosvenor would provide direction for the Na-
tional Geographic Society for the next 66 years.
Those multiple-page spreads and the introduction
of color photography by 1910 transformedNational
Geographicmagazine into the top tier of photojourn-
alism. Noted journalism historian Frank Luther
Mott said that the use of color transformed the
magazine into its own class of publication. Grosve-
nor had experimented with color in 1906, using it
with maps in the August and September issues. That
same year saw another first in the pages ofNational
Geographic, several flashlight photographs of ani-
mals at night. Taken by George Shiras III, these
included deer, fish, and porcupines. In the Novem-
ber 1910 issue, the publication ran the biggest collec-
tion of color pictures to appear in a single magazine
up to that time. Covering 24 pages, the hand-tinted
spread was titled ‘‘Scenes in Korea and China.’’
Another common sight today, the foldout photo-
graph, started in 1911. A large panoramic shot of
the Canadian Rocky Mountains unfolded into a
seven-inch by eight-foot keepsake.
The society’s first of many monetary grants, now
that it was on solid financial footing, was awarded
in 1906 to Commander Robert E. Peary in the
amount of $1,000 to help fund his exploration of
the North Pole region. (Peary, in fact, had been
featured in an article in the firstNational Geo-
graphic back in October 1888. It described the
young civil engineer’s explorations in search of a
proposed ship canal through Nicaragua.) That first
grant was followed by one less publicized for
$25,000 to pay for his 1909 North Pole discovery.
Over the next few years, National Geographic
Society became embroiled in a prolonged contro-
versy as to whether Peary or Dr. Frederick A. Cook
was the first to actually discover the North Pole.
With theNational Geographicbacking, both finan-
cially and in print, Peary became unofficial winner.
The controversy paid off for the magazine, whose
circulation figures jumped to 107,000 by 1912.
Earlier expeditions had been sponsored by the
society, however, including its first in 1890 and
1891 for mapping Mount St. Elias along the
uncharted border between Alaska and Canada. Dur-
ing that outing, the explorers discovered Mount
Logan, Canada’s highest peak at 19,524 feet. Since
the society did not have funds at that time, Hubbard
provided the money for that northern trip. The orga-
nization’s fortune was secure enough by 1911 that
Grosvenor declared that it would provide 15 percent
of its dues revenues to support expeditions and
research proposals every year. He also realized that
explorers needed to take cameras along to record
their discoveries. One rule to photographers was to
avoid getting Westerners in the shot, thus contam-
inating the picture. Society-sponsored expeditions
from 1912 to 1915 led to restoration of Machu Pic-
chu, the ancient city of the Incas, in the Peruvian
Andes. A $10,000 grant in 1912 allowed its disco-
verer, charismatic Yale professor Hiram Bingham
III, to fill an issue ofNational Geographicwith ‘‘In
the Wonderland of Peru.’’ The coverage included
maps, drawings, a now-common foldout panorama,
and 234 photographs taken by Bingham with a
magazine-supplied camera.
More flashlight photos ran in 1913, but this time
Shiras had the animals trip a wire to take their own
pictures. The series was another step of aligning the
magazine with a growing conservation movement
by shooting with cameras, not guns.
While vacationing in Europe in 1913, Grosvenor
saw signs of war. Arriving back at the office, he had
300,000 maps of Europe produced for insertion into
National Geographic ready for when the battles
began the following year, beginning the long tradi-
tion of map inserts. Similarly, in 1918 the magazine
printed a map showing troops along the Western
Front. Americans wanted to know where their sol-
diers were fighting and the map became required
reading for that purpose. Circulation continued to
skyrocket, even during the war when many other
publications saw declines. In 1914, the number was
285,000. At war’s end, four years later, it had
jumped to 650,000. Two years later, with the for-
mer-isolationist United States a world power, circu-
lation leaped beyond three-quarters of a million.
From 1916 to 1921, with the help of its members
bestowing individual gifts along with the society
donations, the organization was instrumental in
purchasing land to protect the West Coast’s giant
sequoias and redwoods. The next popularization
project was massive, stemming from a January
1924 article on Carlsbad Caverns in southwest
New Mexico. More photographs appeared in a
September 1925 follow-up story.
Advancements in aviation enabled Grosvenor to
publish aerial photographs. National Geographic
readers in 1922 were entertained with ‘‘Fighting
Insects with Airplanes: An Account of the Success-
ful Use of the Flying-Machines in Dusting Tall
Trees Infested with Leaf-Eating Caterpillars.’’
Other aerial subjects included the Alps, the Ama-
zon, the Andes, the Arctic, Canada, Mount Ever-
est, and Palestine.
Another society-sponsored trip to the North Pole
was successful on 9 May 1926. This one was byNATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC