Travel tourism is common place today, but it wasn’t a reality for most people in the early 1900’s. At the time, horse and carriage or travel by rail was the common form of transportation. This is why I was surprised as I opened the magazine that I wanted to use for this week’s advertising post, a few of the ads were related to travel.
The ads this week come from the March 1908 National Geographic magazine. It was early enough that Alexander Graham Bell was one of the associate editors for the publication. Many remote areas were still unexplored, but the idea of visiting the far corners of the world was starting to creep into the imagination of everyday people.
Winter Sports in Hawaii
Winter sport in Hawaii! Diamond Head in the background and a surfer front and center in this 1908 advertisement for Hawaii. I’m not sure if this was meant for travel tourism or if it was more to encourage people to move to Hawaii. Either way, it was already being portrayed as a place for fun in the sun.
In reality, Hawaii had only recently become a territory of the United States. There were only a few hotels and a steamship took about 4 1/2 days from San Francisco to Honolulu. This was the infancy of Hawaiian tourism with only a few thousand people visiting each year. In the past hundred years those annual tourist numbers have grown to be millions. Air travel has made it possible for the trip from San Franciso to Honolulu to be completed in only about 5 1/2 hours.
Dreaming of Travel
The image of an airship first caught my attention, but this ship seems to have been used mainly for military purposes. It had a two-person occupancy and was powered by a 70 HP engine.
The written section underneath this image reveals that travel was important to many readers. Not many people could afford travel to far off destinations in 1908, but they could read about it, they could flip through images, and they could imagine what these new exotic locations were like.
Ads in National Geographic magazine and other publications from the early 1900’s helped encourage people to think about the world beyond their front door. In the decades to come, children who grew up viewing these publications would also have the means, through technological advances, to travel to the destinations they had only imagined as kids.
We hope you enjoyed this quick look at a couple of the ads from the March 1908 issue of The National Geographic magazine. There is a lot more interesting information within this magazine, so if you would like to check it out, you can buy it in our shop here.
Many of you might be able to provide more information about the history of tourism. We would love it if you post any additional information in the comments section.
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