Short answers, pulled from the story.
Physical Review was founded in July 1893 by Edward Nichols, a professor at Cornell University, with support from Cornell's incoming president J. Gould Schurman. The American Physical Society took over its publication in 1913.
Physical Review publishes more than a dozen sub-journals, including Physical Review A through E (launched 1970-1993), Physical Review Letters (1958), Physical Review X, Physical Review Applied (2014), Physical Review Fluids (2016), Physical Review Materials (2017), Physical Review Research (2019), PRX Quantum (2020), and PRX Life (2023).
Alfred Loomis, a wealthy scientist, anonymously paid the publication fees for authors who could not afford them during the Great Depression, ensuring research continued to be published despite economic hardship.
The editorial office has been located across the expressway from Brookhaven National Laboratory on Eastern Long Island, New York since 1980. It moved there from the University of Minnesota after editor John Torrence Tate, Sr. died in 1950 and the journal was later consolidated under Samuel Goudsmit and Simon Pasternack.
Reviews of Modern Physics holds the highest impact factor in the Physical Review family, at 44.8 as of 2024. It was first launched by the APS in 1929 to publish longer review articles.
Some Physical Review journals are fully open access, including Physical Review X and Physical Review Research. Since 2011, authors across the family can pay an article processing charge to publish their papers open access under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.