Life Magazine

Life has been the name of two notable United States based magazines.

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Life 1880s-1920s

The first "Life Magazine" was a weekly publication put out by the Life Publishing Company of Manhattan, New York City. It was known for its cartoons, pin up girl art, humorous pieces, and reviews of theater and cinema.

In 1908 Robert Ripley publishes his first cartoon in Life, Ripley in turn becomes first publisher of Charles Schulz, of Peanuts fame.

In 1918 Charles Dana Gibson became the magazine's president.

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Life 1936-2000

The best known "Life magazine" is a photojournalism magazine, founded by Henry Luce in 1936 (first issue dated November 23). Life was published weekly until 1972, irregularly from 1972 to 1978, and was restarted as a monthly magazine in October 1978. A weekly Life in Time of War was published for a month or two during the first Gulf War. Monthly publication ceased in 2000. Starting in 2004 Life was published six times per yer as a special issue, often accompanied by a graphic paperback book, referred to by Life as a "megazine".

As of 2004 Life was owned by AOL Time Warner. Life publication's mission was "to see life; see the world." Life has presented some of the lasting iconic images of the world's notable events. Archival issues of Life are a source of photographic history.

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List of Life magazine's 10 most important events of the last millennium

Life magazine tried to rank the top 10 events of the millennium:

Bookprint (Johann Gutenberg, 1455)
Discovery of New World (Christopher Columbus, 1492)
A new major religion (Martin Luther, 1527)
Steam engine starts industrial revolution (James Watt, 1769)
Earth revolves around sun (Galileo Galilei, 1610)
Germ theory of disease (Louis Pasteur, 1864; Robert Koch,1876)
Gunpowder weapons (China, 1100)
Declaration of independence (US, 1776)
Adolf Hitler comes to power (1933)
Compass goes to sea (China, 1117)

This list has been criticised for being overly focused on Western achievements. For example, the Chinese also invented a variant of book print long before Gutenberg (eg. movable type and printing presses were known but did not replace printing from individually carved wooden blocks), and until the mid 18th century the bulk of the world's printed material was Chinese.

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List of Life magazine's 100 most important people of the last millennium

The list above stands in odd contrast to another, even more criticised list of the US-magazine which unexpectedly placed Edison (a US inventor) first in the "100 Most Important People in the Last 1000 Years". Predictably, this has been dubbed overblown patriotism, since even during Edison's lifetime there were non-US inventors whose inventions (combustion engine, car, electricity-making machines, etc) had greater impact than Edison's. The top 100 list was further criticised for mixing world-famous people of humankind, such as Newton and Einstein and Luther and da Vinci, with numerous Americans largely unknown outside the US:

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Famous employees of Life magazine

Margaret Bourke-White (photojournalist)

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