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Paul Harris, founder of Rotary International

A brief history of Rotary

Rotary International was founded on Febrary 23, 1905, when Paul Harris, a young lawyer alone in Chicago, met with three of his friends in the office of one of them, Gustavus Loehr, a mining engineer, to talk about an idea he had been developing.

The idea was that business and professional men should get together periodically to enjoy each other's company, and enlarge their circles of acquaintances. Membership would be limited to one representative of each business and profession, and they would meet weekly, rotating the meeting place to each member's place of business. Hence, Rotary.

The first Rotary roster showed thirty members; three years later, a second club was formed in San Francisco, and by 1910, there were sixteen clubs and about 1,500 members across the United States. The first convention was held that year in Chicago, at which the clubs were formally united.

The following year, a club was successfully organized in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and Rotary became an international organization. Other clubs were established in Dublin, Ireland and other parts of Great Britain.

Rotary's distinctive emblem was designed in 1905, and evolved to its current design in 1923; the official description, including its colors, were adopted at the 1929 convention held in Dallas. The 1920s also featured the establishment of the four Avenues of Service.

The Rotary Foundation was established in 1917, and was formally approved in 1928, but didn't reach its current prominence within the organization until the period following World War II. In 1985, the Foundation initiated its Polio Plus program, raising over $200 million to eradicate the polio virus from the face of the earth in just three years, well in advance of the 2005 deadline originally set.