THE FIRST SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN MAGAZINE IS PUBLISHED

Today, The Grandma has received the wonderful visit of Joseph de Ca'th Lon, one of her closest friends. 

Joseph loves Science, and they have been talking about Scientific American, the popular science magazine, whose first issue was published on a day like today in 1845.

Scientific American, informally abbreviated SciAm or sometimes SA, is an American popular science magazine.

Many famous scientists, including Albert Einstein, have contributed articles to it. In print since 1845, it is the oldest continuously published monthly magazine in the United States, although it did not become monthly until 1921. 

Scientific American is owned by Springer Nature, which in turn is a subsidiary of Holtzbrinck Publishing Group.

Scientific American was founded by inventor and publisher Rufus M. 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.

More information: Scientific American

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 partners -publisher 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. On April 13, 2020, Laura Helmuth assumed the role of editor-in-chief.

More information: Scientific American

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, Nikkei Science, followed three years later.

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.

In March 1996, Scientific American launched its own website that included articles from current and past issues, online-only features, daily news, special reports, and trivia, among other things. The website introduced a paywall in April 2019, with readers able to view a few articles for free each month.

More information: Youtube-Scientific American

Science knows no country,
because knowledge belongs to humanity,
and is the torch which illuminates the world.
Science is the highest personification of the nation
because that nation will remain the first
which carries the furthest
the works of thought and intelligence.

Louis Pasteur