Businessweek at 90: Covering Business Through the Decades

The first issue of this magazine appeared on Sept. 7, 1929. Its black, red, and gold art deco cover was free of news. It featured a big triangle pointing down at an inscrutable photo—an overhead, nighttime view of an intersection in an unidentified big city.

The editors obviously had no way to know that seven weeks later the stock market would crash, ushering in the Great Depression. They did observe that “the market is now almost wholly ‘psychological’—irregular, unsteady, and properly apprehensive of the inevitable readjustment that draws near.” But in the metaphorical style of the day, they also said, “There is no financial frost in the air as yet, and we look for a long stretch of Indian summer in industry before winter sets in.” The first issue carried squibs on tariffs, railroads, farms, Palestine, and even this tech breakthrough: “Dry Ice Finds Many New Uses.”