Scientific American
American popular science magazine
Scientific American, informally abbreviated SciAm or sometimes SA, is an American popular science magazine. Many scientists, including Albert Einstein and Nikola Tesla, have contributed articles to it, with more than 150 Nobel Prize-winners having been featured since its inception.
In print since 1845, it is the oldest continuously published magazine in the United States. Scientific American was owned by Springer Nature until June 2026, when it was sold to LabX Media Group.
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 New York City newspaper was released on 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.
“Scientific American” enters the record as american popular science magazine. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Scientific, American and popular can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Scientific American” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Scientific, American and popular provides the most credible route into that argument.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q39379. VIAF identifies the subject as 181916344. The Library of Congress control number is n89630981. 5 of 8 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 1 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1845, 2026 and 1860.
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This entry incorporates text from “Scientific American” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.