The Daily Mail once paid aviators to cross the Channel and the Atlantic
Punch thought the offer was absurd and mocked it with a £10,000 prize for flying to Mars. Yet by 1910 both of the Daily Mail's early aviation prizes, for London to Manchester and a Channel crossing, had been claimed. In 1919 Alcock and Brown collected another £10,000 for the first transatlantic flight.
Alfred Harmsworth and his brother Harold launched the paper on 4 May 1896 at a halfpenny, half what rival London dailies charged, with shorter and more populist coverage. Planners expected to print 100,000 copies; demand on day one reached 397,215, forcing the brothers to find extra presses. Lord Salisbury sneered that it was written by office boys for office boys, but by 1902 its sales passed a million, the biggest in the world.
Innovation ran alongside stunts. From 1900 it printed in Manchester as well as London, the first national title to do so, a method others copied over the following decades. It courted women readers with a dedicated section and sent Sarah Wilson, one of the earliest female war correspondents, to the Second Boer War. In 1908 it started the Ideal Home Exhibition, which Northcliffe first dismissed as an advertising gimmick until his wife changed his mind; the paper kept it until 2009.
Some campaigns backfired. Attacking Lord Kitchener over munitions in May 1915 sent circulation plunging from 1,386,000 to 238,000, and stockbrokers burned unsold copies. A 1920 contest for a new hat drew 40,000 entries and produced the Sandringham, part top hat and part bowler, which never caught on. Amy Johnson's solo flight from England to Australia in 1930 earned yet another £10,000 prize.
Now owned by the Daily Mail and General Trust, chaired by the 4th Viscount Rothermere, it switched from broadsheet to compact on its 75th anniversary in 1971. Women form a majority of its readers, unusual among British dailies. It has won national newspaper of the year awards, while facing sustained criticism for unreliable and sensational science and health stories.
Source: Daily Mail
