little over a year later.) Their own prospects did not seem much brighter than the
Independent’s
, but, Harry explained, “the best thing seems to be to keep lugging until we’re licked and we can stand a lot of licking yet. So carry on in hope is our motto.” By late July they had made modest progress—“38,000 in hand;” but that was still far from the one hundred thousand dollars they believed they needed. They were, Harry said, “laying many traps, wires, and fences, and are not without hope of achieving our purpose.” But “not without hope” was far from the confidence they had once expressed, and both Hadden and Luce were spending many long nights worrying about failure. 31
Suddenly, in August, their fortunes changed. At the suggestion of a friend, Harry rode up to the Yale Club for a meeting with a recent graduate, William Hale Harkness, class of 1922, and his wealthy mother, Mrs. William L. Harkness, hoping at best for a $5,000 investment. To his astonishment Mrs. Harkness pledged $20,000 to the magazine, and her son $5,000 more, which—when combined with other small investments they had recently accumulated—brought their total up to $65,000. Another $10,000 came quickly from two other members of the Harkness family. “That means,” an exultant Luce wrote, “that by the end of September at latest we will be capitalized. So the end of a very long and arduous and trying job is now at least within crying distance.” And while the last $25,000 proved even more difficult to raise than the first, they managed to push their total up to nearly $87,000 by late October, at which point they decided to move ahead. A few weeks later—as carpenters banged away in the new and larger offices they had rented at Eighth Avenue and Thirty-third Street—they filed the papers that would create their new company. 32
It had been hard during the long months of collecting endorsements and money to focus on the magazine itself. But Luce and Hadden did work steadily, amid all their other efforts, at building a staff, refining and elaborating their plans, and—not least—finding a name.
Hadden and Luce always claimed that they had never intended to stick with “Facts,” the working title for many months of what they were half-mockingly calling between themselves “the world’s greatest magazine.”In the spring of 1922 they began to experiment with alternatives. For a while, they were attracted to “What’s What,” and they briefly considered such others as “Destiny,” “Chance,” and the “Synthetic Review.” But one spring morning Luce came into the office to propose another name. He had, he later said, been riding home on the subway the night before, exhausted and glassy eyed, mindlessly reading the advertising cards above the car windows. For some reason he focused on an announcement—“Time for a Change,” or something like it, he later recalled—and he became convinced that “Time” was the right title. Hadden immediately agreed, and they never reconsidered. “Time” was attractive to them because it captured something of the dual purpose of their enterprise—to chronicle the passage of time and to save readers precious time. “Take Time—It’s Brief,” was one of the early slogans they attached to their announcements of the new publication; “Time Will Tell” and “Time Is Valuable” were others. They also attached a pretentious Latin phrase (
De omni re scibili et quibusdam aliis
—“About all things knowable and some others”). “Time” was not a particularly original title. Newspapers all over the world called themselves the
Times
, and there had been an English magazine in the late nineteenth century named “Time,” which Luce and Hadden soon discovered and whose logo they used as the basis of the distinctive lettering in the title of their own magazine. They experimented with various subtitles, using such words as “chronicle” and “digest” and “weekly
Independent’s
, but, Harry explained, “the best thing seems to be to keep lugging until we’re licked and we can stand a lot of licking yet. So carry on in hope is our motto.” By late July they had made modest progress—“38,000 in hand;” but that was still far from the one hundred thousand dollars they believed they needed. They were, Harry said, “laying many traps, wires, and fences, and are not without hope of achieving our purpose.” But “not without hope” was far from the confidence they had once expressed, and both Hadden and Luce were spending many long nights worrying about failure. 31
Suddenly, in August, their fortunes changed. At the suggestion of a friend, Harry rode up to the Yale Club for a meeting with a recent graduate, William Hale Harkness, class of 1922, and his wealthy mother, Mrs. William L. Harkness, hoping at best for a $5,000 investment. To his astonishment Mrs. Harkness pledged $20,000 to the magazine, and her son $5,000 more, which—when combined with other small investments they had recently accumulated—brought their total up to $65,000. Another $10,000 came quickly from two other members of the Harkness family. “That means,” an exultant Luce wrote, “that by the end of September at latest we will be capitalized. So the end of a very long and arduous and trying job is now at least within crying distance.” And while the last $25,000 proved even more difficult to raise than the first, they managed to push their total up to nearly $87,000 by late October, at which point they decided to move ahead. A few weeks later—as carpenters banged away in the new and larger offices they had rented at Eighth Avenue and Thirty-third Street—they filed the papers that would create their new company. 32
It had been hard during the long months of collecting endorsements and money to focus on the magazine itself. But Luce and Hadden did work steadily, amid all their other efforts, at building a staff, refining and elaborating their plans, and—not least—finding a name.
Hadden and Luce always claimed that they had never intended to stick with “Facts,” the working title for many months of what they were half-mockingly calling between themselves “the world’s greatest magazine.”In the spring of 1922 they began to experiment with alternatives. For a while, they were attracted to “What’s What,” and they briefly considered such others as “Destiny,” “Chance,” and the “Synthetic Review.” But one spring morning Luce came into the office to propose another name. He had, he later said, been riding home on the subway the night before, exhausted and glassy eyed, mindlessly reading the advertising cards above the car windows. For some reason he focused on an announcement—“Time for a Change,” or something like it, he later recalled—and he became convinced that “Time” was the right title. Hadden immediately agreed, and they never reconsidered. “Time” was attractive to them because it captured something of the dual purpose of their enterprise—to chronicle the passage of time and to save readers precious time. “Take Time—It’s Brief,” was one of the early slogans they attached to their announcements of the new publication; “Time Will Tell” and “Time Is Valuable” were others. They also attached a pretentious Latin phrase (
De omni re scibili et quibusdam aliis
—“About all things knowable and some others”). “Time” was not a particularly original title. Newspapers all over the world called themselves the
Times
, and there had been an English magazine in the late nineteenth century named “Time,” which Luce and Hadden soon discovered and whose logo they used as the basis of the distinctive lettering in the title of their own magazine. They experimented with various subtitles, using such words as “chronicle” and “digest” and “weekly
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