Rotary began in Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A., when attorney Paul P. Harris formed the Rotary Club of Chicago on February 23, 1905, seeking to recreate the friendly spirit he had known in small towns, and its name came from the early practice of rotating meetings among members' offices. Over the following decade, Rotary spread across the United States from San Francisco to New York, and by 1921 clubs existed on six continents; the organization adopted the name Rotary International in 1922. As it grew, Rotary expanded from serving the professional and social interests of members to pooling resources and talents to aid communities in need, expressing that ideal in the motto Service Above Self and later in the ethical code called The 4-Way Test, translated into hundreds of languages. During and after World War Two, Rotarians took a larger role in promoting international understanding: in 1945, forty-nine Rotary members served in twenty-nine delegations to the United Nations Charter Conference, Rotary continued sending observers to major U.N. meetings and promoting the United Nations in its publications, and a 1943 London Rotary conference on cultural and educational exchanges helped inspire the establishment of UNESCO in 1946. An endowment fund created by Rotarians in 1917 for doing good in the world became The Rotary Foundation in 1928, and after Paul Harris's death in 1947, donations totaling U.S. two million dollars launched its first program, graduate fellowships later called Ambassadorial Scholarships. Today, The Rotary Foundation receives more than U.S. eighty million dollars annually for humanitarian grants and educational programs. In 1985, Rotary committed itself to immunizing the world's children against polio; through PolioPlus, in partnership with nongovernmental organizations and national governments, it became the largest private-sector contributor to the global polio eradication campaign, mobilized hundreds of thousands of volunteers, and immunized more than one billion children worldwide, with half a billion dollars expected to be contributed by the 2005 certification target for a polio-free world. Approaching the twenty-first century, Rotary also expanded its service efforts to environmental degradation, illiteracy, world hunger, and children at risk, admitted women worldwide for the first time in 1989, spread into Central and Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and today includes 1.2 million Rotarians in about 31,000 clubs across 166 countries.
