Scientific American

• 1. Introduction

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  Scientific American hit newsstands on the 28th of August, 1845, as a four-page weekly newspaper. It cost a few cents and arrived in a country still debating whether the telegraph would ever work. Nearly two centuries later, that same publication is still in print, making it the oldest continuously published magazine in the United States. Albert Einstein contributed articles to it. So did Nikola Tesla. More than 150 Nobel Prize-winners have appeared in its pages. How does a science magazine survive almost two centuries of war, censorship, corporate takeovers, and cultural upheaval? And what does it mean when such a magazine finally breaks one of its oldest rules?

• 2. The Inventor Who Sold Too Soon

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  Rufus Porter, the man who created Scientific American, was an inventor and publisher, not a scientist. He launched the paper in New York City in 1845 as a venue for reporting on what was happening at the U.S. Patent Office. That was the beat: new machines, new devices, new claims on the future. The first issues covered things like perpetual motion machines and the universal joint, a mechanical coupling now found in nearly every automobile ever manufactured. Porter's instincts about the subject were sound, but his patience for the business was not. Only ten months after founding the paper, he sold it. The buyers were Alfred Ely Beach, son of media magnate Moses Yale Beach, and Orson Desaix Munn. Those two family names would define the publication for the next century. Editors from the Beach family included Frederick C. Beach and his son Stanley Yale Beach; from the Munn side came Charles Allen Munn and his nephew Orson Desaix Munn II. The magazine remained under Munn and Company until 1948, shifting across generations while the American science landscape transformed around it.

• 3. The 1948 Reinvention

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  By the years following World War II, Scientific American had lost its edge. Under Orson Desaix Munn III, it had drifted toward something resembling a hobbyist workbench publication, closer in spirit to the Popular Science of that era than to a serious forum for science. Three partners with plans to start a fresh magazine called The Sciences saw the situation differently. Rather than build from scratch, they bought the assets of the struggling Scientific American and put their new designs under its historic name. Publisher Gerard Piel, editor Dennis Flanagan, and general manager Donald H. Miller Jr. essentially built a new magazine on top of an old title. What followed was a sustained growth in readership; by the time Flanagan and Piel stepped down in 1984, circulation had grown fifteen-fold since 1948. Miller retired in 1979. Gerard Piel's son Jonathan then took over as president and editor. In 1986, the Holtzbrinck Publishing Group of Germany acquired the magazine.

• 4. A Government Orders a Burning

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  In April 1950, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission ordered Scientific American to halt publication of an issue containing an article by physicist Hans Bethe. The AEC concluded the article revealed classified information about the thermonuclear hydrogen bomb. The commission did not stop at suppressing the issue. It ordered 3,000 copies of an early press run burned. A subsequent review found the AEC had overreacted. Gerard Piel, the publisher, then leaked news of the burning to the press. The image of a government agency destroying copies of an American science magazine struck observers as, in the words used at the time, "book burning in a free society." For the new Scientific American, the incident became a defining moment, drawing a line between scientific inquiry and state control of information.

• 5. Columns, Television, and Libraries

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  Martin Gardner ran his Mathematical Games column in the magazine for years, introducing recreational mathematics to a general readership. Douglas Hofstadter followed with Metamagical Themas, and Michael Shermer's Skeptic column joined later. A. K. Dewdney covered Computer Recreations, while James Burke contributed his Connections series. From 1990 to 2005, the magazine produced a television program on PBS called Scientific American Frontiers, hosted by Woodie Flowers and later Alan Alda. Between 1983 and 1997, its publishing division, the Scientific American Library, released an encyclopedia set of volumes on topics ranging from gravity to linguistics to the second law of thermodynamics. These books were not sold in retail stores; they were available only as Book of the Month Club selections, priced between $24.95 and $32.95. In 2010, the magazine launched a publishing imprint in partnership with Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

• 6. Going Global

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  Scientific American's first international edition appeared in 1890 in Spanish, titled La America Cientifica e Industrial. It did not last far into the twentieth century. The modern wave of international editions began in 1968 with the Italian Le Scienze, followed by the Japanese Nikkei Science in 1971. A Spanish-language revival for Spain, Investigacion y Ciencia, launched in 1976. Pour la Science brought the magazine to French readers in 1977, and the German Spektrum der Wissenschaft arrived in 1978. Poland's Swiat Nauki began in 1991 under Proszynski Media. The Taiwanese edition, Scientist, was established in Taipei in 2002, the same year Spektrum der Wissenschaft introduced Gehirn und Geist, a spinoff focused on psychology and neuroscience. A Dutch edition debuted in 2003, published by Cascade in Antwerp. That same year, Italy launched a second title, Mente e Cervello, to complement Le Scienze. The magazine's Scientific American 50 award, which started in 2002 to recognize contributions across fields from agriculture to medical diagnostics, publishes its winners each December.

• 7. Controversy and Editorial Reckoning

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  In 2013, biologist and blogger Danielle N. Lee was called a "whore" in an email by an editor at the science website Biology Online, after she declined to write without compensation. Lee posted a response on the Scientific American blog. Editor-in-chief Mariette DiChristina removed the post, citing legal reasons. The Biology Online editor was fired. Within days, the magazine's blog editor Bora Zivkovic faced allegations of sexual harassment from blogger Monica Byrne, who said the incident had occurred about a year earlier. DiChristina told readers the matter had been investigated and resolved to Byrne's satisfaction. Zivkovic had publicly supported Lee, which prompted Byrne to name him. Zivkovic confirmed the incident, apologized to Byrne, and described his behavior as "singular," saying it was not "engaged in before or since." He then resigned from Science Online, the science blogging conference he had co-founded with Anton Zuiker, and from his position at the magazine. Several other female bloggers subsequently published their own accounts of harassment involving Zivkovic.

• 8. Breaking 175 Years of Silence

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  The October 2020 issue of Scientific American carried something the magazine had never published in its 175-year history: a presidential endorsement. The editors backed Joe Biden, pointing specifically to Donald Trump's rejection of scientific evidence, including his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. The column stated directly: "Scientific American has never endorsed a presidential candidate in its 175-year history. This year we are compelled to do so. We do not do this lightly." In September 2024, the magazine endorsed Kamala Harris in the presidential race, a second endorsement in its history and offered for the same stated reason. Two months later, in November 2024, editor-in-chief Laura Helmuth resigned after apologizing for a social media post in which she had characterized some Trump supporters as fascists. Journalist Jesse Singal objected publicly to what he described as the magazine's shift toward social justice politics at the expense of scientific credibility. The question of what a science magazine owes its readers, and how political a scientific institution can become before it changes its essential nature, remained unresolved as David M. Ewalt took over as editor in 2025.