The New York Times

The New York Times was founded as the New-York Daily Times on September 18, 1851, by journalist and politician Henry Jarvis Raymond and former banker George Jones. It originally sold for a penny (equivalent to 28 cents today).

First published issue of New-York Daily Times, on September 18, 1851.

The newspaper shortened its name to The New-York Times in 1857 and dropped the hyphen in the city name in the 1890s

The New-York Times joined other major dailies on April 21, 1861, in adding a Sunday edition to offer daily coverage of the Civil War.

The formerly named Longacre Square acquired its present name of Times Square in April 1904 after The New York Times moved its headquarters there. The Times stayed in the building for less than ten years before moving to a new building on 229 West 43rd Street.

One Times Square under construction in 1903

Unemployed architect Alfred M. Butts came up with the idea of Scrabble in 1930. He worked out his letter scores by looking at the frequency with which individual letters appeared in the New York Times.

In April 1934, The New York Times printed a picture of a man flying using a breath-powered machine. The photo was actually a joke from the April Fool's Day edition of the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung.

Not The Times, a parody of The New York Times appeared on newsstands during an 88-day strike of newspaper employees in 1978.  The parody featured three sections, 24 joke advertisements, 73 spoof articles and 155 fake news briefs, all meticulously edited to mimic The Times’s style. The writer of one column praised Genghis Khan for his ability to “get things done." "We all had a lot of time on our hands," the designer Richard Yeend said.

The Al-Quaeda attacks on the World Trade complex in New York and the Pentagon took place on September 11, 2001. The following morning, the New York Times ran a headline: "America's Emergency Line: 9/11". That was the first use in print of the nine-eleven name by which the attacks became known.

There's more information in one edition of the New York Times than the average person in 17th century England would have come across in a lifetime.

It takes about 63,000 trees to make the newsprint for the average Sunday edition of The New York Times.

A one word article was the shortest ever published in the New York Times. The title: “When I’m Mistakenly Put on an Email Chain, Should I Hit ‘Reply All’ Asking to Be Removed?” The article by Daniel Victor, read in its entirety: “No.”

The greatest ever strain on paperboys is thought to have been the 1,612-page Sunday edition of The New York Times of September 13, 1987, which weighed 12lb.