Meeting at the Cosmos Club in Washington, D.C., 33 men founded the National Geographic Society "for the increase and diffusion of geographical knowledge." The organization would go on to sponsor expeditions to both poles, the deepest ocean trenches, and outer space, and its magazine's iconic yellow border became one of the most recognized designs in publishing.
The founders were an eclectic mix — cartographers, lawyers, financiers, and military officers — brought together by a shared restlessness about the unmapped corners of the globe. Gardiner Greene Hubbard, a lawyer and Alexander Graham Bell's father-in-law, became the Society's first president; Bell himself would later take the helm.
Nine months after the founding meeting, the Society published the first issue of National Geographic Magazine, a dry scientific journal with a terracotta cover. It took decades and the arrival of editor Gilbert Grosvenor to transform it into the photography-driven publication recognizable today, with its trademark yellow border first appearing in 1910. The Society would go on to fund Robert Peary's Arctic expeditions, Jacques Cousteau's ocean dives, and Jane Goodall's chimpanzee research — turning a Washington dinner club into one of the world's most influential scientific and storytelling institutions.