The Growth of the Chicago Tribune
In the issue of the Chicago Tribune of July 23 is a striking object-lesson of the wonderful growth of this country, as well as of the paper itself and the city in which it is printed. The issue mentioned is a special containing fifty-two pages, and in addition to its regular news and business service, gives an interesting history of the wonderful growth of Chicago, and incidentally of the Chicago Tribune, established there in 1847, when Chicago was a little town of 16,000 inhabitants. That town has now grown in population to 1,800,000. In that time the Chicago Tribune has grown from an unpretentious sheet to one of the most completely equipped newspapers of this dynamic age. The quarters of the Tribune in 1847 were unpretentious in the extreme. It now occupies a magnificent twelve-story steel-and-brick structure, with basement and sub-basement thirty feet below the street, and foundations resting on rock formation fifty feet below the floor of the sub-basement. To print that paper, six of the most modern perfecting presses are required, in addition to a mammoth seven-cylinder color press, all of which operating one single hour are able to turn out 328,000 sixteen-page papers, finished, folded, and counted. This is a wonderful achievement; but we are living in an age of wonders, the culminating age of this world, an age full of meaning and full of lessons to the child of God.