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Scientific American Featured Article aptiumoncology.com | Athena Media - Scientific American features Dr. Cutler and pheromones athenainstitute.com | Cryonics and Scientific American alcor.org |
Scientific American (informally abbreviated to SciAm) is a popular science magazine published since August 28, 1845, which according to the magazine makes it the oldest continuously published magazine in the United States.[1] It brings articles about new and innovative research to the amateur and lay audience. Scientific American had a worldwide monthly circulation of roughly 733,000 as of December 2008, including newsstand sales of over 100,000[2] It is not a refereed scientific journal, such as Nature; rather, it is a forum where scientific theories and discoveries are explained to a broader audience.
[edit] HistoryScientific American was founded by Rufus M. Porter, who grew up in Bridgton, Maine, as a single-page newsletter. Throughout its early years much emphasis was placed on reports of what was going on at the U.S. Patent Office. It also reported on a broad range of inventions including perpetual motion machines, an 1849 device for buoying vessels by Abraham Lincoln, and the universal joint which now finds place in nearly every automobile manufactured. Current issues feature a "this date in history" section, featuring excerpts from articles originally published 50, 100, and 150 years earlier; topics include humorous incidents, wrong-headed theories, and noteworthy advances in the history of science and technology. Porter sold the newsletter in 1846 to Alfred Ely Beach and Orson Desaix Munn I, and until 1948 it remained owned by Munn & Company. Under the second Orson Desaix Munn III, grandson of the first, it had evolved into something of a "workbench" publication, similar to the 20th century incarnation of Popular Science. In the years after World War II, the magazine was dying. Three partners who were planning on starting a new popular science magazine, to be called The Sciences, instead purchased the assets of the old Scientific American and put its name on the designs they had created for their new magazine. Thus the partners -- publisher Gerard Piel, editor Dennis Flanagan, and general manager Donald H. Miller, Jr. -- created essentially a new magazine, the Scientific American magazine of the second half of the twentieth century. Miller retired in 1979, Flanagan and Piel in 1984, when Gerard Piel's son Jonathan became president and editor; circulation had grown fifteenfold since 1948. In 1986 it was sold to the Holtzbrinck group of Germany, who have owned it since. In the fall of 2008, Scientific American was put under the control of Nature Publishing Group, a division of Holtzbrinck.[3] Donald Miller died in December, 1998,[4] Gerard Piel in September 2004 and Dennis Flanagan in January 2005. Mariette DiChristina is the current editor-in-chief, after John Rennie stepped down in June 2009.[3] [edit] International editionsScientific American published its first foreign edition in 1890, the Spanish-language "La America Cientifica." Publication was suspended in 1905, and another 63 years would pass before another foreign-language edition appeared: In 1968, an Italian edition, Le Scienze, was launched, and a Japanese edition, Nikkei Science (日経サイエンス), followed three years later. Kexue (科学，“Science” in Chinese), a simplified Chinese edition launched in 1979, was the first Western magazine published in the People's Republic of China. Later in 2001, a newer edition, Global Science (环球科学), was published instead of Kexue, which shut down due to financial problems. Today, Scientific American publishes 18 foreign-language editions around the globe: Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Lithuanian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, and Spanish. From 1902 to 1911, Scientific American supervised the publication of the Encyclopedia Americana, which during some of that period was known as The Americana. [edit] First issue
 It originally styled itself "The Advocate of Industry and Enterprise" and "Journal of Mechanical and other Improvements". On the front page of the first issue was the engraving of "Improved Rail-Road Cars". The masthead had a commentary as follows:
The commentary under the illustration gives the flavor of its style at the time:
Also in the first issue is commentary on Signor Muzio Muzzi's proposed device for aerial navigation. [edit] Editors
 [edit] Special issues
[edit] Scientific American 50 awardThe Scientific American 50 award was started in 2002 to recognise contributions to science and technology during the magazine's previous year. The magazine's 50 awards cover many categories including agriculture, communications, defence, environment, and medical diagnostics. The complete list of each year's winners appear in the December issue of the magazine, as well as on the magazine's web site. [edit] WebsiteIn March 1996 Scientific American launched its own website that includes articles from current and past issues, online-only features, daily news, weird science, special reports, trivia, "Scidoku" and more. [edit] ColumnsNotable features have included:
[edit] TelevisionScientific American also produced a TV program on PBS called Scientific American Frontiers. [edit] Controversies
In its January 2002 issue, Scientific American published a series of criticisms of the Bjorn Lomborg book "The Skeptical Environmentalist". Cato Institute fellow Patrick J. Michaels said the attacks came because the book "threatens billions of taxpayer dollars that go into the global change kitty every year."[7] Journalist Ronald Bailey called the criticism "disturbing" and "dishonest", writing, "The subhead of the review section, 'Science defends itself against The Skeptical Environmentalist,' gives the show away: Religious and political views need to defend themselves against criticism, but science is supposed to be a process for determining the facts."[8] The May 2007 issue featured a column by Michael Shermer calling for a United States pullout from the Iraq War.[9] In response, Wall Street Journal online columnist James Taranto jokingly called Scientific American "a liberal political magazine".[10] Though not a controversy on a scientific topic, in May 1988 science writer Forrest Mims was a candidate to take over The Amateur Scientist column, which needed a new editor. He was asked to write some sample columns, which he did in 1990. Mims was not offered the position, due, he alleged, to his creationist views. Various newspapers, starting with the Houston Chronicle which broke the story and later The Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post and the New York Times, published articles critical of the magazine for rejecting the author, not on science but on his personal religious views. The publisher was criticized with it notified collegiate libraries that subscribe to the journal that yearly subscription prices would increase by nearly 500% for print and 50% for online access to $1500 yearly.[11] [edit] See also
[edit] ReferencesSpecific references:
General references:
[edit] External links
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