National Geographic Society – The Intelligent Collector Magazine

An archive of documents from the early days of Bell Telephone Company – including correspondence by Gardiner G. Hubbard, Alexander Graham Bell’s father-in-law – sold for $10,157 at an October 2012 Heritage auction.

By Jim O’Neal

In 2013, Nancy and I took a cruise from New York City to Montreal. On Sept. 23, we had the great pleasure of touring the Alexander Graham Bell museum in Baddeck, Nova Scotia. We were struck by its unusual design, which is based on the tetrahedron form used in his many flight experiments with kites. There were also numerous original artifacts, photographs and exhibits of his groundbreaking scientific accomplishments.

Bell (1847-1922) was awarded patent #174465 just four days after his 29th birthday for the first practical telephone – “the most valuable single patent ever issued” in any country. Our guide informed us that Bell would not allow a telephone in his study or laboratory since he considered it a distraction to his reading and experiments. I was aware that both his mother and wife were deaf and this had a profound effect on his passion for working on sound, speech and hearing. What surprised me was the breadth of his scientific achievements. He was awarded 18 patents and collaborated on another 12 in medicine, aeronautics, genetics, electricity, sound and marine engineering.

Another surprise was that his wife Mabel was the daughter of Gardiner Greene Hubbard, founder and first president of the National Geographic Society (founded in 1888) and also the first president of Bell Telephone Company (later AT&T). Although AGB (he got a middle name only after constantly nagging his father) was not a founder of National Geographic, he was its second president, following his father-in-law. This was organizational incest on a scale that rivaled the British monarchy.

But the result was an organization that has given several generations a certain sense of where we are and where we want to go. Commanders-in-chief, explorers, schoolchildren and even daydreamers have put their full trust in the splendid maps of the National Geographic Society and their brilliant cartographers. The elegant and clearly legible typefaces for place names, one source of the map’s mystique, were designed by the magazine’s staff in the 1930s.

It was founded in Washington, D.C., at the Cosmos Club, another venerable organization founded in 1878 and boasting of membership by three presidents, two vice presidents, 12 Supreme Court justices, and 36 Nobel and 61 Pulitzer Prize winners (they don’t bother with ordinary U.S. senators).

During World War II, National Geographic maps were at the epicenter of the action, thanks in part to a U.S. president who was deeply interested in geography. The society had furnished Franklin D. Roosevelt with a cabinet that was mounted on the wall behind the desk in his private White House study. Maps of continents and oceans could be pulled down by the president like window shades; they were in constant use throughout the war.

In the early winter of 1942, President Roosevelt urged the American people to have a world map available for his next fireside chat, scheduled for the evening of Feb. 23. FDR told his aides, “I’m going to speak about strange places that many have never heard of – places that are now the battleground for civilization. … I want to explain to the people something about geography – what our problem is and what the overall strategy of the war has to be. I want to tell it to them in simple terms of ABC so that they will understand what is going on and how each battle fits into the picture. … If they understand the problem and what we are driving at, I am sure that they can take any kind of news on the chin.”

There was an unprecedented run on maps and atlases. The audience, more than 80 percent of the country’s adult population, was the largest for any geography lesson in history.

The National Geographic Society went on, expanding the scope of its focus – with maps for the amazing Mount Everest to outer space and the ocean floor. As the Society’s former chief cartographer put it: “I like to think that National Geographic maps are the crown jewels of the mapping world.”

He was right, until Google maps created a new technology in need of its own headware.

Intelligent Collector blogger JIM O’NEAL is an avid collector and history buff. He is president and CEO of Frito-Lay International [retired] and earlier served as chair and CEO of PepsiCo Restaurants International [KFC Pizza Hut and Taco Bell].

Robert E. Peary was included in a 1910 tobacco card set of the “World’s Greatest Explorers.”

By Jim O’Neal

In September 1909, two men, both Americans, emerged from the frozen tundra of the Arctic, each claiming they had accomplished something no other explorers had in recorded history. They had reached the North Pole!

The North Pole is a rather strange place. A point with no dimensions, no thickness or breadth, where every direction is south and a year is divided into one day and one night. At the time, it was 400 miles from any solid ground, across an ocean more than 5 miles deep, covered by a jumble of enormous blocks of ice drifting with the wind and the gravitational pull of the moon.

Of the two men, Frederick Cook’s claim had priority – he said he had been at the Pole in April 1908, but had been forced to winter in the Arctic another season because of bad weather. However, his veracity was strongly contested by rival explorer Robert E. Peary. Peary disputed Cook’s claim and proceeded to assert that he’d reached the North Pole on April 6, 1909. His message to The New York Times stated, “I have the pole, April sixth. Expect arrive Chateau Bay, September seventh. Secure control wire for me there and arrange expedite transmission big story. PEARY”

Thus began a series of insults and verbal attacks that the newspapers reveled in. A classic example comes from The Philadelphia Record in 1909: “Dr. Cook is either the greatest and at the same time the stupidest charlatan who ever attempted to impose upon a skeptical world, or he is the victim of the most malignant and devilishly ingenious persecution that hatred and envy could devise.”

The controversy widened after Cook’s ascent of Mount McKinley (Denali) was also questioned. Perhaps inevitably, it devolved into a litany of charges that included bribes, death threats and even sexual improprieties. Cook’s claims gradually came to be regarded as elaborate hoaxes. Attempts to ascertain the truth through impartial commissions and Congressional hearings all ended inconclusively.

However, what was proved (without any doubt) was that Frederick Cook – physician, explorer, author and lecturer – was also a crook who sold fraudulent stock in oil companies. A Fort Worth, Texas, judge sent him to jail for almost 15 years. President Franklin Roosevelt pardoned him in 1940, 10 years after he had been released from prison. He died shortly after that on Aug. 5 the same year.

Meanwhile, despite having been certified by the National Geographic Society, Peary’s claim about the North Pole was never secured. Even modern scholars have pointed out major discrepancies in his assertions and it seems unlikely he actually made it. He died embittered and exhausted by the long struggle despite receiving numerous medals, honorary degrees and international recognition.

Today, the only fact we know for certain is that in 1985, Sir Edmund Hillary (first to summit Mount Everest) and astronaut Neil Armstrong (first man to stand on the moon) actually landed at the North Pole in a small twin-engine plane. This allowed Sir Hillary to claim to be the first to stand on both the South and North Poles and on the summit of Everest.

It’s not clear to me why some ambitious reporter like Anderson Cooper didn’t simply ask some of the local residents about Cook and Peary … Santa and his elves are generally hanging around assembling the toys and stuff. That old North Pole is still a very strange place.

Tag: National Geographic Society

Bell’s Influence on National Geographic Society Often Overlooked

Explorers Traded Insults, Verbal Attacks in Quest to be First