In the In Times Past column, David W. Dunlap explores New York Times history through artifacts housed in the Museum at The Times.
As the United Nations came into existence 80 years ago, The New York Times took the opportunity to make a splashy debut on the global stage.
On the morning of April 25, 1945, 2,000 delegates and attendees at the United Nations Conference on International Organization in San Francisco received a complimentary edition of The Times that had gone to press in Manhattan at 2 a.m. Eastern War Time. In an era shortly before the widespread advent of television and long before the internet, it was sensational to be reading a newspaper that had been composed across the continent only hours earlier.
The Times described its facsimile edition as the “first experiment of its kind in the history of journalism.”
At the newspaper’s headquarters at the time, 229 West 43rd Street, printers laid out the special U.N. edition in lead type: four solid pages of news articles and war maps, with no photographs and no advertisements. After the type was inked in the composing room, the printers pulled a proof of each page. These page proofs were cut in half, then scanned and transmitted as facsimile images to San Francisco over wirephoto lines maintained by The Associated Press.
The eight half-pages arrived as photo negatives in The A.P.’s San Francisco bureau, situated in the San Francisco Chronicle building. Prints were made from these negatives. A messenger hurried the prints to The Richmond Independent’s printing plant, 15 miles away across San Francisco Bay.
Photoengravers at The Independent pieced the half-pages back together, then made zinc engravings of the recombined pages. Because the special edition had so few pages and such a small run, it could be printed on an old-fashioned flatbed press. The papers were then trucked to San Francisco and dropped off at the attendees’ hotels to greet the delegates first thing in the morning.
The Museum at The Times has a bound copy of all 64 issues produced during the conference. Taken together, their banner headlines speak eloquently about the tortuous finale of World War II: “Hitler Dead in Chancellery, Nazis Say; Doenitz, Successor, Orders War to Go On; Berlin Almost Won; U.S. Armies Sweep On” (May 2); “The War in Europe Is Ended! Surrender Is Unconditional; V-E Will Be Proclaimed Today; Last Fighting in Czech Pocket” (May 8); “Truman Closes United Nations Conference With Plea to Translate Charter Into Deeds; B-29’s Keep Up Assault on Honshu Plants” (June 27).
And, yes, The Times used an exclamation point.
David W. Dunlap, a retired Times reporter and columnist, is the curator of the Museum at The Times, which houses Times artifacts and historical documents.
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