(FORTUNE Magazine) – "Business, in the modern sense of the word, is the distinctive expression of the American genius." --From a prospectus written by Time co-founder Henry Luce, less than a year before he would ignore almost everyone's advice and launch FORTUNE, in February 1930. He pressed on, he said, because he believed the new business magazine had "a fifty-fifty chance."

The issue of FORTUNE you hold in your hand--fat and sassy--marks our 70th anniversary of publication, which, among other things, pretty much vindicates Luce's gamble. In today's world--glutted with seemingly random business information emanating from everywhere but our faucets--it's almost impossible to imagine what a unique and startling publishing event it was when Luce sprang his lavishly produced "de luxe" monthly business magazine on a nation just beginning to feel the deep pain of the Depression. Luce's board had discouraged him from launching FORTUNE, worrying that it would distract him from the still-fledgling Time. Luce rebuffed an offer from rival publisher Conde Nast to merge the two men's companies (and let Luce run them), preferring instead to concentrate on launching a magazine that would fill what he called "a most conspicuous gap."

"Where," he asked in the prospectus, "is the publication that even attempts to portray Business in all its heroic present-day proportions, or that succeeds in conveying a sustained sense of the challenging personalities, significant trends, and high excitements of this vastly stirring Civilization of Business?"

The answer, of course, was that Luce had it, and it would cost you a shocking $10 a year. He justified that price by touting the magazine's "resourceful journalism, brilliant writing, superlative photography, and master craftsmanship." The critics agreed, in stunning reviews. After all, Margaret Bourke-White was its first staff photographer, and Archibald MacLeish was crafting its prose. If the magazine was good enough, Luce reasoned, subscribers would cheerfully pay for it. And so they did.

FORTUNE's writers, editors, and artists created several new journalistic forms, including the "corporation story," descendants of which now appear in virtually every business publication. Years later, the FORTUNE 500 entered the business lexicon as the standard by which we measure a company's stature. And today, business--and FORTUNE--is hotter than ever. Just last month, FORTUNE actually outsold all other magazines on the newsstands at Barnes & Noble nationwide. Imagine a business magazine outselling the likes of Time, Newsweek, People, even Maxim! What's more remarkable, though, is how much of what Luce envisioned for the original FORTUNE still rings true today.

The magazine, he said, "will attempt, subtly, to 'take a position,' particularly as regards what may be called the ethics of business...in a general way, the line can be drawn between the gentleman and the money-grubber, between the responsible and the irresponsible citizen." (To see how this still applies, don't miss Peter Elkind's incredible yarn in this issue on the great Azerbaijani oil swindle). Luce went on to declare that FORTUNE "will have literary standards of the highest--and if Babbitt doesn't like literature he doesn't have to read it." We like to think that's still true today, though not everything Luce envisioned is. He declared that the magazine would have no advice on how to run your business (whoops) and no tipstering (see Investing).

Still, today's history lesson helps explain what we were thinking when we set out to produce this anniversary issue--devoted in large part to the amazing future of business. We had two goals as editors: first, to provide a special treat for loyal readers, an issue more reflective and less temporal than you would want us to produce every two weeks; second, to re-create--or at least echo--some of the aesthetic spirit that Luce infused into his original FORTUNE.

To that end, we commissioned executive editor Rob Norton--one of our most gifted magazine makers--to conceptualize and produce a 99-page special section. We told him to spare no expense, and, of course, he didn't--from the writers to the illustrators to the paper and the ink. The resulting package not only reads brilliantly, it also offers stunning graphics and images--including fabulous portfolios of FORTUNE's early photography and classic covers. (Luce: "It will be beautiful.") For that, we thank associate art director Maria Keehan and assistant picture editor Mia Diehl.

As it happens, Norton--who's most visible these days as writer of the delightfully contrarian economics column called Not So Fast--is also the editor who oversaw one of the other signal events associated with FORTUNE's 70th anniversary issue, the launching of two new indexes--the FORTUNE e-50 Index, which we believe to be the most rationally weighted Internet index so far devised, and the FORTUNE 500 Index, which offers some favorable performance comparisons with other large-cap indexes (for more, see the story in this issue).

As long as we're reminiscing about our launch, we should take the opportunity to tell you that FORTUNE plans to present its own offspring in May--a fully independent monthly magazine and integrated website called eCompany Now. It's a publication aimed at any business person trying to cope with the vast opportunity--or threat--posed by the Internet. You can check out its beginnings right now at www.ecompany.com. But eCompany Now's arrival doesn't in any way diminish FORTUNE's continued commitment to bring you the very best in business thinking and reading available anywhere. In doing so, we might well heed more words from Luce's original plan. After enumerating a bunch of places FORTUNE would take its readers--"to the tip of the wing of the airplane and through the depths of the ocean along be-barnacled cables"--he says (in that backward prose for which Time Inc. was once famous): "Into all these matters FORTUNE will inquire with unbridled curiosity. And, above all, FORTUNE will make its discoveries clear, coherent, vivid, so that the reading of it may be one of the keenest pleasures in the life of every subscriber." A worthy goal--for another 70 years at least.