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Scientific American

American monthly science magazine

  • 9 min read
  • 11 chapters
Title: Scientific American Abstract/medium: 1 print : color ; sheet 42 x 29 cm (poster format)
Artist Posters · Public domain

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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. It started as a weekly publication in August 1845 before turning into a monthly in November 1921.

Porter sold the publication to Alfred Ely Beach, son of media magnate Moses Yale Beach, and Orson Desaix Munn, a mere ten months after founding it. Editors and co-owners from the Yale family included Frederick C. Beach and his son, Stanley Yale Beach, and from the Munn family, Charles Allen Munn and his nephew, Orson Desaix Munn II. Until 1948, it remained owned by the families under Munn & Company. Under Orson Munn's grandson, Orson Desaix Munn III, it had evolved into something of a "workbench" publication, similar to the 20th-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 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. In April 2020, Laura Helmuth assumed the role of editor-in-chief.

In 2009, the publisher notified collegiate libraries that yearly subscription prices for the magazine would increase by nearly 500% for print and 50% for online access to $1,500 yearly.

Offices of the Scientific American have included 37 Park Row in Manhattan and the Woolworth Building in 1915 when it was just finished two years earlier in 1913. The Woolworth Building was at the time one of the first skyscrapers in the city and the tallest one in the world.

In June 2026, Springer Nature sold Scientific American and Spektrum der Wissenschaft to focus on its core research, health, and education publishing. Scientific American was acquired by LabX Media Group, while Spektrum acquired by GeraNova Bruckmann. The Writers Guild of America East unit at the publication criticized the sale, along with the attendant layoff of 15 staff members including the majority of the unit's organizers, as motivated by union-busting and censorship.

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