From the Publisher

By Elizabeth Valk Long

IT WAS PAST MIDNIGHT WHEN HENRY R. LUCE AND BRITON Hadden and their colleagues jammed themselves into three taxis and drove to a printing plant in downtown Manhattan. Working till dawn, they wrote copy to fill holes and supplied captions for illustrations that years later were described as looking as though they had been engraved on pieces of bread.

Those were heady hours. Luce and Hadden, recently out of Yale, had struggled for about a year scrounging up financial backing to launch a radically new idea in journalism: a weekly newsmagazine that aimed to summarize world events and organize them in pithy style. Now editors Luce and Hadden were putting to press the first issue of TIME, with House Speaker "Uncle Joe" Cannon on the cover. "It wasn't bad at all," Luce wrote later. "In fact, it was quite good. Somehow it all held together -- it made sense, it was interesting."

That edition was dated March 3, 1923 -- 70 years ago this week. Through all those decades, this magazine has changed in both style and appearance many times. The news has changed too, but a glance at the headlines of 1923 is a reminder that many events suggest a certain eerie sameness while others show how far the U.S. has progressed.

A presidential Administration (Harding's) was reeling in a welter of scandal, most of it dealing with accusations of graft. The anticipated federal deficit was -- are you ready? -- $180 million and, according to Washington -- ready again? -- soon would be wiped out. The government reported that the U.S. (pop. 111,947,000) had 10 million registered passenger cars and 20,550,000 horses. A helicopter stayed aloft at 15 feet for 2 minutes and 45 seconds. Southern blacks, hounded by poverty and a rampaging Ku Klux Klan, were moving to the North in large numbers.

Inventor C. Francis Jenkins demonstrated his "long-distance cinema" by transmitting "still" pictures over radio waves from Washington to Philadelphia. U.S. Navy astronomer Captain Thomas Jefferson Jackson See denounced Albert Einstein as a fraud. Birth control was a subject of passionate debate, and in fact was forbidden under the U.S. penal code ("Every obscene, lewd or lascivious book . . . designed for preventing conception or producing abortion . . . is hereby declared to be non-mailable matter"). As this last item suggests, some attitudes do change. What has not changed in 70 years, however, is our determination to ensure that TIME still holds together, makes sense, stays interesting.