Short answers, pulled from the story.
Scientific American was founded by inventor and publisher Rufus Porter in 1845. The first issue was released on the 28th of August, 1845, as a four-page weekly newspaper based in New York City. Porter sold the publication only ten months after founding it, to Alfred Ely Beach and Orson Desaix Munn.
Scientific American has been in continuous print since 1845, making it the oldest continuously published magazine in the United States. It began as a weekly newspaper in August 1845 and transitioned to a monthly format in November 1921.
Scientific American is owned by Springer Nature, which is a subsidiary of Holtzbrinck Publishing Group. The Holtzbrinck Publishing Group of Germany acquired the magazine in 1986, and in the fall of 2008 it was placed under Holtzbrinck's Nature Publishing Group division.
Scientific American endorsed a presidential candidate for the first time in its 175-year history in October 2020, backing Joe Biden. It endorsed Kamala Harris in September 2024, marking only the second endorsement in the magazine's history, citing the same reason of political rejection of scientific evidence.
In April 1950, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission ordered Scientific American to stop publication of an issue containing an article by Hans Bethe about the thermonuclear hydrogen bomb, claiming it revealed classified information. The AEC ordered 3,000 copies of an early press run burned. A later review found the AEC had overreacted, and publisher Gerard Piel leaked the story to the press.
More than 150 Nobel Prize-winners have been featured in Scientific American since the magazine's inception in 1845. Contributors have included Albert Einstein and Nikola Tesla.