Before exploring some of the possibilities of illustration, it may be interesting to glance at what has been done in this direction since the invention of producing blocks rapidly to print at the type press and the improvements in machinery.
In the spring of 1873 a Canadian company started a daily illustrated evening newspaper in New York, called The Daily Graphic, which was to eclipse all previous publications by the rapidity and excellence of its illustrations. It started with an attempt to give a daily record of news, and its conductors made every effort to bring about a system of rapid sketching and drawing in line. But the public of New York in 1873 (as of London, apparently, in 1893) cared more for “pictures,” and so by degrees the paper degenerated into a picture-sheet, reproducing (without leave) engravings from the Illustrated London News, the Graphic, and other papers, as they arrived from England. The paper was lithographed, and survived until 1889.
The report of the first year’s working of the first daily illustrated newspaper in the world is worth recording. The proprietors stated that although the paper was started “in a year of great financial depression, they have abundant reason to be satisfied with their success,” and further, that they attribute it to “an absence of all sensational news.”(!)
The report ended with the following interesting paragraph:
“Pictorial records of crime, executions, scenes involving misery, and the more unwholesome phases of social life, are a positive detriment to a daily illustrated newspaper. In fact, the higher the tone and the better the taste appealed to, the larger we have found our circulation to be.”
The great art, it would seem, of conducting a daily illustrated newspaper is to know what to leave out—when, in fact, to have no illustrations at all!
In England the first systematic attempt at illustration in a daily newspaper was the insertion of a little map or weather chart in the Times in 1875, and the Pall Mall Gazette followed suit with a dial showing the direction of the wind, and afterwards with other explanatory diagrams and sketches.
But, in June, 1875, the Times and all other newspapers in England were far distanced by the New York Tribune in reporting the result of a shooting match in Dublin between an American Rifle Corps and some of our volunteers. On the morning after the contest there were long verbal reports in the English papers, describing the shooting and the results; but in the pages of the New York Tribune there appeared a series of targets with the shots of the successful competitors marked upon them, communicated by telegraph and printed in the paper in America on the following morning.[4]
After this period we seem to have moved slowly, only some very important geographical discovery, or event, extorting from the daily newspapers an explanatory plan or diagram. But during the “Transit of Venus,” on the 6th of December, 1882, a gleam of light was vouchsafed to the readers of the Daily Telegraph (and possibly to other papers), and that exciting astronomical event from which “mankind was to obtain a clearer knowledge of the scale of the universe,” was understood and remembered better, by three or four lines in the form of a diagram (showing, roughly, the track of Venus and its comparative size and distance from the sun) printed in the newspaper on the day of the event.
Maps and plans have appeared from time to time in all the daily newspapers, but not systematically, or their interest and usefulness would have been much greater. Many instances might be given of the use of diagrams in newspapers; a little dial showing the direction of the wind, is obviously better than words and figures, but it is only lately that printing difficulties have been overcome, and that the system can be widely extended.