Scientific American

''Scientific American'', informally abbreviated ''SciAm'' or sometimes ''SA'', is an American popular science magazine. Many famous scientists, including Albert Einstein and Nikola Tesla.

History

''Scientific American'' was founded by inventor and publisher Rufus Porter in 1845 as a four-page weekly newspaper. The first issue of the large format newspaper was released August 28, 1845.

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 1860 device for buoying vessels by Abraham Lincoln, and the universal joint which now can be found in nearly every automobile manufactured. Current issues include 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. It started as a weekly publication in August 1845 before turning into monthly in November 1921.

Porter sold the publication to Alfred Ely Beach and Orson Desaix Munn a mere ten months after founding it. Until 1948, it remained owned by Munn & Company. Under Munn's grandson, Orson Desaix Munn III, it had evolved into something of a "workbench" publication, similar to the twentieth-century incarnation of ''Popular Science''.

In the years after World War II, the magazine fell into decline. In 1948, three partners who were planning on starting a new popular science magazine, to be called ''The Sciences'', purchased the assets of the old ''Scientific American'' instead and put its name on the designs they had created for their new magazine. Thus the partnerspublisher Gerard Piel, editor Dennis Flanagan, and general manager Donald H. Miller, Jr.essentially created a new magazine. Miller retired in 1979, Flanagan and Piel in 1984, when Gerard Piel's son Jonathan became president and editor; circulation had grown fifteen-fold since 1948. In 1986, it was sold to the Holtzbrinck Publishing Group of Germany, which has owned it until the Springer-Nature merger. In the fall of 2008, ''Scientific American'' was put under the control of Holtzbrinck's Nature Publishing Group division.

Donald Miller died in December 1998, Gerard Piel in September 2004 and Dennis Flanagan in January 2005. Mariette DiChristina became editor-in-chief after John Rennie stepped down in June 2009, and stepped down herself in September 2019. In April 2020, Laura Helmuth assumed the role of editor-in-chief.

The magazine is the oldest continually published magazine in the United States.

International editions

''Scientific 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, ', followed three years later. A new Spanish edition, ''Investigación y Ciencia'' was launched in Spain in 1976, followed by a French edition, ', in France in 1977, and a German edition, ', in Germany in 1978. A Russian edition ''V Mire Nauki'' (russian: «В мире науки») was launched in the Soviet Union in 1983, and continues in the present-day Russian Federation. ''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. Founded in Chongqing, the simplified Chinese magazine was transferred to Beijing in 2001. Later in 2005, a newer edition, ''Global Science'' (环球科学), was published instead of ''Kexue'', which shut down due to financial problems. A traditional Chinese edition, known as ', was introduced to Taiwan in 2002. The Hungarian edition ''Tudomány'' existed between 1984 and 1992. In 1986, an Arabic edition, ', was published. In 2002, a Portuguese edition was launched in Brazil.

Today, ''Scientific American'' publishes 18 foreign-language editions around the globe: Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Lithuanian (discontinued after 15 issues), 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''.

Some famous individuals who penned articles in the magazine included Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, Jonas Salk, Marie Curie, Stephen Hawking, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Stephen Jay Gould, Bill Gates, Nikola Tesla

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