Fortune Archives: A reflection of ‘Industrial Life in ink and paper’

This month, Fortune magazine marked the 95th anniversary of its first issue in February 1930.

That inaugural magazine—featuring an illustration of the Roman goddess Fortuna and her wheel on the cover, and weighing two pounds—was just the first step in what Fortune would become. In the words of cofounder Henry Luce, the magazine was to be a reflection of “Industrial Life in ink and paper and word and picture, as the finest skyscraper reflects it in stone and steel and architectural design.”

Fortune, over the next 95 years, would feature the words of famous writers and journalists, such as Ernest Hemingway, James Agee, and Carol Loomis; publish the photographs of esteemed documentarian Margaret Bourke-White; be one of the first publications to uncover malfeasance at the energy company Enron; coin the terms “hedge fund,” “groupthink,” and “HENRYs”; and, of course, in 1955, launch the still-definitive list of Big Business: the Fortune 500.

So, to celebrate Fortune’s almost century of business journalism excellence, we reached back into the archive to look at a few stories from the issue that started it all. —Jack Long, newsletter production editor

Color in industry

Long before there were Reddit threads on home design or any such thing as a Pantone Color of the Year, Fortune informed the business world that “In a suddenly kaleidoscopic world, color had become a master salesman, a distributor extraordinary.”

Until recently, the article observed, the American home had generally been a muted palette of porcelain white, brown wood, and metal fixtures: “Things were, so to speak, as God made them—each object deriving its color from the material of which it was fashioned.” But by 1930, Americans had begun to see their living environments as a kind of blank canvas for artistic expression.

“The young housewife of today is called upon to pronounce aesthetic judgment upon such varied and extraordinary objects as wheelbarrows, washstands, stoves and ice cubes,” the article explains. “It has become possible for her to say: ‘I hate that double boiler,’ or ‘I think that bathtub is beautiful.’”

As anyone browsing the aisles of Ikea or Crate & Barrel in 2025 can attest, that sometimes bewildering profusion of choice has only accelerated in the 95 years since. —Indrani Sen, senior features editor

Sand into glass

In 1930, Fortune detailed the “white-haired old glassmakers” at New York’s Corning glass company, who slowly molded and blew vases, bowls, and candlesticks.

Little did they know that this type of artistry is what Corning would be least known for today. The 173-year-old company is now famous for its iconic kitchen brands such as Pyrex and CorningWare and for answering the call of Apple’s Steve Jobs to create Gorilla Glass—that touch-sensitive, hard-to-shatter glass encasing your smartphone. 

With $13 billion in 2023 revenue, the glassmaker is now focusing on creating the next-gen fiber-optic cables powering the AI revolution. —Kristin Stoller, editorial director

A budget for a $25,000 income in Chicago

Toward the back of the magazine, Fortune published a lament about the difficulty of living on an annual income of $25,000 (about half a million today), when the author and his spouse, Anne, had assumed his salary of $15,000 was enough to “live in regal splendor.” (The other $10,000 in the equation came from “revenue from securities.”) Many of his complaints resonate today: Medical bills, groceries, and school tuition have skyrocketed, making building blocks of the American Dream like homeownership and comfortable retirement feel out of reach even for high earners. 

But other line items on the author’s budget evoke past and privilege: The cost of throwing dinner parties looms large, and the writer implores Anne to “swallow her pride and install a nickel-in-the-slot device” on their home phone, to avoid servants racking up long-distance charges. —Katherine Raymond, copy editor

Automobilization of the Orient

“Fords in the Himalayas, Chevrolets in the Sudan,” Fortune declared in 1930. “Here, too, waiting for roads to travel on, is the Next Great Market.”

American-made cars made up about 75% of the Chinese market that year, with U.S. autos, particularly GM’s Buick, being a status symbol in the interwar period. Decades later, even as Asian carmakers such as Toyota and Hyundai grew their share of the U.S. market, China again became the “Next Great Market” for American brands, such as GM, Chrysler, and Ford, which returned to serve drivers desperate for foreign-made cars.

Now, almost a century since Fortune first covered the Asian car market, China’s EV market is booming but GM’s market share has plummeted from around 15% a decade ago to just 7% today, as I reported in a recent story. —Nicholas Gordon, Asia editor