My dad subscribed to these for many years from the 50s-70s. I used to sit in our attic reading old issues, with projects based around vacuum tubes, transistors, lasers (!) and even surveillance. It seriously ignited my love of engineering.
I came across new issues in the 90s as an adult and the articles seemed to be quite dumbed down. It had lost the magic of those old issues.
I recommend the April 1929 issue. I found this in an antique store 10+ years ago, and it has (at least) two articles of interest:
The main one is "Einstein's Topsy-Turvy world", complete with picture of the 50-year old Einstein with dark hair. It talks about his "Unified Field Theory" book, attempting to explain it to a 1920's lay audience. It includes an artist's rendition of the 4th dimension.
I also found interesting an article about someone learning to fly. This is 26 years after the Wright brothers and aviation is still young.
Popular Science shuttered the print version of the magazine in April 2021 after 151 years of publication. The online version, which was started in 2021 and published quarterly, only lasted until November 2023.
For a long time I had subscriptions to Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, and Scientific American. Scientific American slid down into the space Popular Science was by really lightening up the content of their analysis. (An interview with their editor-in-chief called it being 'more accessible' by writing for people who had not attended college versus for people who had at least a four year college degree). Everybody suffered from 'the web' and how much stuff was being put out for 'free' and nobody understood information economics yet.
I still get Popular Mechanics, mostly because I subscribed using miles on an airline I don't fly hardly at all. And I ended up dropping my SciAm subscription in favor of Science News.
That funny for me to read, I stopped buying Scientific American I think in the early 2000s as I found the articles too far beyond my comprehension at time and didn't have time to study them in detail.
I had a subscription for a short time in the 2000s, to me it felt like it was too popular and not enough science. It was like the IFL science version of people magazine
National geographic had and has better science content
I've been reading the first few years of Popular Science for a project [0]. In the 1870s, the magazine is an interesting slice of science and philosophy. It really shows the breadth and power of Edward Youmans' network.
Here's a cool article [1] about how the founding of Popular Science was bound up with Herbert Spencer's book The Study of Sociology (1873) and was printed on a shoestring budget.
I stumbled on this fantastic piece promoting the use of UTC time, but incidentally giving a great history of the standardisation of time more generally and the adoption of 24h clock notation over AM/PM.
My dad subscribed to these for many years from the 50s-70s. I used to sit in our attic reading old issues, with projects based around vacuum tubes, transistors, lasers (!) and even surveillance. It seriously ignited my love of engineering.
I came across new issues in the 90s as an adult and the articles seemed to be quite dumbed down. It had lost the magic of those old issues.
Same here but from the 80's. Lots of early home computers and peripherals which were obsolete by the time I read them (early 90's)
I recommend the April 1929 issue. I found this in an antique store 10+ years ago, and it has (at least) two articles of interest:
The main one is "Einstein's Topsy-Turvy world", complete with picture of the 50-year old Einstein with dark hair. It talks about his "Unified Field Theory" book, attempting to explain it to a 1920's lay audience. It includes an artist's rendition of the 4th dimension.
I also found interesting an article about someone learning to fly. This is 26 years after the Wright brothers and aviation is still young.
Popular Science shuttered the print version of the magazine in April 2021 after 151 years of publication. The online version, which was started in 2021 and published quarterly, only lasted until November 2023.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/28/business/media/popular-sc...
For a long time I had subscriptions to Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, and Scientific American. Scientific American slid down into the space Popular Science was by really lightening up the content of their analysis. (An interview with their editor-in-chief called it being 'more accessible' by writing for people who had not attended college versus for people who had at least a four year college degree). Everybody suffered from 'the web' and how much stuff was being put out for 'free' and nobody understood information economics yet.
I still get Popular Mechanics, mostly because I subscribed using miles on an airline I don't fly hardly at all. And I ended up dropping my SciAm subscription in favor of Science News.
That funny for me to read, I stopped buying Scientific American I think in the early 2000s as I found the articles too far beyond my comprehension at time and didn't have time to study them in detail.
I had a subscription to SciAm when I was young, back in the 1970s. It was like something published on a different planet.
I had a subscription for a short time in the 2000s, to me it felt like it was too popular and not enough science. It was like the IFL science version of people magazine
National geographic had and has better science content
I've been reading the first few years of Popular Science for a project [0]. In the 1870s, the magazine is an interesting slice of science and philosophy. It really shows the breadth and power of Edward Youmans' network.
Here's a cool article [1] about how the founding of Popular Science was bound up with Herbert Spencer's book The Study of Sociology (1873) and was printed on a shoestring budget.
[0] https://bcmullins.github.io/research-from-1873/
[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/986404
> The future is going to be better, and science and technology are the driving forces that will help make it better.
Popular Science fosters a sense of responsibility and agency (in a way)
wish the entire thing was downloadable
Please, someone convert this to plain text.
Much of it has been done: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Popular_Science_Monthly
Thanks for this - it's a very accessible format.
I stumbled on this fantastic piece promoting the use of UTC time, but incidentally giving a great history of the standardisation of time more generally and the adoption of 24h clock notation over AM/PM.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Popular_Science_Monthly/Volum...
Not sure you're qualified to comment here if you don't already have all these downloaded somewhere on an external drive.