Scientific American once reported on a boat-lifting invention by Abraham Lincoln
America's oldest continuously published magazine began in 1845 as a four-page weekly obsessed with the Patent Office. Its early pages covered perpetual motion schemes, the universal joint and an 1860 device by Abraham Lincoln for buoying vessels. Contributors later included Einstein and Tesla, and more than 150 Nobel laureates have appeared in it.
The inventor and publisher Rufus Porter launched Scientific American in New York on 28 August 1845 as a large-format newspaper. Just ten months later he sold it to Alfred Ely Beach, son of the press magnate Moses Yale Beach, and Orson Desaix Munn. Their families ran it through Munn and Company until 1948, and under Orson Munn's grandson it had turned into something of a hands-on workbench magazine. It switched from weekly to monthly in November 1921, and its offices once occupied the newly finished Woolworth Building, then the tallest skyscraper in the world.
After the Second World War the old magazine declined. In 1948 three partners, Gerard Piel, Dennis Flanagan and Donald Miller, who had been planning a new title called The Sciences, bought Scientific American's assets and put its name on their own designs, effectively creating a fresh publication. By 1984, when Piel's son Jonathan took over as president and editor, circulation had grown fifteen-fold.
Ownership has since passed through large groups. Germany's Holtzbrinck bought it in 1986, placed it under its Nature Publishing Group division in 2008, and it later sat within Springer Nature until LabX Media Group bought it in June 2026. Mariette DiChristina edited it from 2009 to 2019, followed by Laura Helmuth in April 2020. In 2009 the publisher angered university libraries by announcing print subscription rises of nearly 500 percent.
One enduring feature looks backwards: a this-date-in-history section reprints extracts from issues 50, 100 and 150 years earlier, including comic episodes, misguided theories and genuine breakthroughs.
Source: Scientific American
