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Four Brands from the 1940s that Foretold the Future
Over seventy years later, their influence lives on
America in the 1940s was on the cusp of becoming a global consumer powerhouse. World War II further fueled the American economy, first as wartime products were created for military use and later as the country’s manufacturers returned to peacetime production. During the 1940s, numerous new products entered the market, some of which created entirely new categories or were so innovative as to influence later generations. Here are four of them.
LIFE magazine
No magazine was better known in the 1940s and 1950s than LIFE magazine. In 1936, Henry Luce, who also published TIME and FORTUNE magazines, bought the rights to the name LIFE and turned it from a weekly humor publication into a weekly newsmagazine. Over the years, the magazine itself seemed larger than life, largely because of its superb, award-winning photojournalism.
With its bold, universally recognized masthead (white capitalized letters on a red background) and oversized pages, LIFE was ideally suited to report on the war in pre-TV America. Reporters and photographers covered the war around the globe as well as on the home front and LIFE chronicled history as it happened. LIFE reached a circulation high point of over 13 million as…
