Bertie Charles Forbes

Bertie Charles Forbes was a Scottish-American financial journalist and the founder of Forbes magazine. Born in 1880 in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, he emigrated to the United States in 1904 after a journalism apprenticeship that began at age fourteen on a local newspaper. He worked for the Journal of Commerce and the Hearst newspapers in New York, where his syndicated business columns built his reputation as a clear and accessible interpreter of finance for the lay reader. In 1917 Forbes launched the magazine that still bears his name, originally subtitled "Devoted to Doers and Doings." The magazine pioneered a then-novel approach to business journalism — profiling the individual personalities, habits, and ethical reasoning of major industrialists rather than treating business news as the impersonal movement of numbers. The B.C. Forbes editorial voice, blunt, moralistic, and deeply skeptical of speculative excess, helped distinguish Forbes from older trade publications and established the human-profile-driven approach that the magazine has retained for more than a century. His books, including Men Who Are Making America, Keys to Success, and the perennial column collections published under the Forbes imprint, gathered his interview-driven journalism and aphoristic business advice for a broad American readership. Many of his short formulations on character, frugality, and persistence circulated widely in early twentieth-century business writing and remain in print today. Forbes ran the magazine until his death in 1954, after which the publication passed to his son Malcolm Forbes and subsequent generations of the Forbes family. The magazine he founded grew into one of the most widely read business publications in the world, with rankings such as the Forbes 400 and Forbes Global 2000 becoming standard references in international business coverage.