The Explorers: A Century of Discovery

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In Washington, D.C.

the Trustees of

the National Geographic Society

gather to have a formal portrait taken.

The picture will help commemorate

the Society's Centennial.

In 1988 Geographic completes

one hundred years of exploration,

research, and education.

Everybody looking right at the lens.

Ready?

All right. Okay. Fine. Right here.

Nice big smile now. Come on.

Here, in 1913,

a similar photograph was taken.

Back then, the highest mountain

had yet to be climbed,

and no one knew the ocean deep,

or what fire illuminates the stars.

All this lay in the future

the greatest adventure mankind

has ever known.

The explorers have left monuments

all over the world.

One of the most meaningful,

and at the same time little-known,

is to be found high on a hilltop

in Nova Scotia.

Here, alone with the sigh of the wind,

are the graves of Alexander Graham Bell

and his wife, Mabel.

Bell called their estate here

Beinn Bhreagh,

or "beautiful mountain"

In the late 1800s Bell spent much of

his time promoting

the National Geographic Society.

It was the favorite preoccupations

of a man

whose boundless creativity

changed everyone's life forever.

Inventing the telephone made

Bell's fortune.

It also freed him to pursue

his many interests

and enjoy his growing family.

Enthusiastic, generous, and warmhearted,

Bell became a grandfather figure

to the world.

When young Gilbert Hovey Grosvenor

caught the eye

of Bell's elder daughter, Elsie,

Bell offered him a job in Washington.

The couple was married in 1900.

They set up housekeeping not far

from Grosvenor's office

at 15th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue

It was an exciting time to be alive.

Americans were thrilled

by modern innovations

and their growing political power.

Grosvenor became the first full-time

employee of National Geographic,

Which was kept going mainly

/be Bell's contributions.

In a tiny office sometimes piled high

with unsold Magazines,

Grosvenor worked to realize Bell's hope

that Geographic's journal could

somehow pay the Society's way.

From its first issue the Magazine

had been a liability.

It had been called "suitable for

diffusing geographic knowledge among

those who already had it,

/and scaring off the rest".

It often featured day,

scholarly articles not meant

for the general public.

But there were also pictures

photographs of far-away people

and places that stirred the imagination.

When be became Managing Editor in 1900

Grosvenor started publishing

more photographs,

selected according to one of

his favorite maxims:

"The mind must see

before it can believe".

A famous Geographic tradition

began in 1896 with this picture.

Grosvenor stoutly defended the policy

of showing people dressed,

or undressed,

according to the customs in their land

At the turn of the century

the eye of the camera

was capable of wondrous revelations.

In 1906 an entire issue of

National Geographic was devoted

to portraits of animals taken

in the wild.

Photographer George Shiras sneaked up

on his subjects at night

with a camera and

explosive flash powder.

His pictures astonished the world.

With a later technique Shiras

startled animals

with a blank gun shot

and then captured them

an instant later in ghostly flight.

Geographic and its Magazine

soon prospered

and more innovations followed

Even before true color photography

was practical,

colored pictures were published

by hand tinting black-and-white prints

according to notes the photographer

had made in the field.

Purists found these pictures artificial

but readers loved them just the same.

From the beginning the most popular

Geographic authors were explorers.

The Magazine made history in 1909

when it published Robert Peary's

account of discovering the North Pole.

Peary once wrote: I shall not be

satisfied that I have done my best

until name is known from one end of

the world to the other.

Peary's closest associate

was the pioneering black explorer

Mattew Henson.

In 1908 he and Peary set out together

on their fourth polar expedition.

On March 1, 1909.

Peary set off for the pole.

According to plan,

the rest of the party turned back

as supplies ran down.

After a month only Peary, Henson,

and four Eskimos were left to press on

with the dogs.

Peary's account of the next few days

remains controversial.

He reported good weather

and excellent progress.

Later, some thought his story too

good to be true.

In any event,

Peary reported he reached the pole

on April 6, 1909.

Peary wrote in his diary:

"The Pole at last!

Linking hands with Roald Amundsen

who reached the South Pole

two years later,

Robert Peary found the fame

he had sought so long.

In 1913 he and Amundsen met

for the first time

when being honored

by the National Geographic.

Hardly less pleased were Dr. Bell

and his son-in-law Gilbert Grosvenor.

National Geographic was a going concern

and Bell was delighted to have it

all in the family.

Grosvenor's decorum veiled his daring

and ambition.

He took quite literally Bell's

expansive admonition that

"the world and all that is

in it is our theme".

Some four years after

the sensation over Peary,

another explorer became

a household name.

Hiram Bingham was a professor

of Latin American history at Yale.

In search of a fabled lost city,

he traveled to Peru.

So he found Machu Picchu,

Abandoned by the Incas 450 years ago,

The first National Geographic

archeological grant

was made to help clear

and map the colossal ruins.

It took more than $20,000 and months

of labor to reveal them all.

In 1917 one of the first

National Geographic expeditions

to be documented in motion pictures

explored a rare freak of nature

the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes

in Alaska.

This bizarre landscape was

the aftermath

of a gigantic volcanic explosion

several years before.

In this nightmare world,

superheated steam hissed

from millions of vents

and often, it seemed,

the ground itself was alive

Scientists attempted to explore

the larger fissures,

but barely escaped being boiled alive.

More than half a million members

now shared in the exploration

of such natural wonders.

And the home of Alexander Graham Bell

had become the unofficial summer

headquarter of the National Geographic

On holidays the hard-pressed Grosvenor

set up his office in a tent

on the lawn of Beinn Bhreagh.

On these visits the

Grosvenor children enchanted

their legendary Grandfather Bell.

The great inventor was over 60,

but still a bold explorer.

He astonished and sometimes alarmed

his Nova Scotia neighbors

with his odd inventions.

Giant kites made up of tetrahedral

cells were Bell's obsession.

They taught him much about aeronautics

and some were large enough

to life a man.

Bell's avid interest in aviation

culminated in 1909

with the first flight in Canada

by a powered airplane.

One of Bell's last experiments was

a hydrofoil speedboat called the HD-4.

It worked perfectly.

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