ralphc 5 hours ago

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.

ot1138 5 hours ago

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.

  • bluedino 5 hours ago

    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)

pfdietz 7 hours ago

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...

  • ChuckMcM 6 hours ago

    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.

    • mywacaday 3 hours ago

      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.

    • pfdietz 5 hours ago

      I had a subscription to SciAm when I was young, back in the 1970s. It was like something published on a different planet.

  • bigfishrunning 7 hours ago

    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

    • Loughla 32 minutes ago

      I will agree with national geographic. I was afraid it would slip when it was purchased by Murdoch (that's right, isn't it?). But it did not.

cantrevealname 2 hours ago

I stumbled on an April 1950 article predating and predicting the H-Bomb: "Production of the hydrogen atomic bomb has been ordered by the President of the United States. Within one to three years, it is unofficially predicted, the first of the most awesome military weapons ever built may be ready for test."

https://books.google.ca/books?id=DC0DAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PP1&pg=PA1...

And sure enough in the 1950s when the U.S. had a can-do government that could get things done on schedule did it within "one to three years" as predicted:

- Operation Greenhouse in 1951 as first successful release of nuclear fusion energy raised expectations to a near certainty that the concept would work. (1)

- Then on 1 November 1952, the Teller–Ulam configuration was tested at full scale in the "Ivy Mike" shot at an island in the Enewetak Atoll. (2)

Somehow I had the impression that in the 1950s, the government and the press (at the government's behest) were much more secretive about how the H-bomb would work, but I found the Popular Science article surprisingly informative. We say thermonuclear weapon rather than H-bomb these days, but I didn't see anything in the article that seemed inaccurate compared to what's known publicly today.

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Greenhouse

(2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermonuclear_weapon#History

  • Loughla 34 minutes ago

    I'm convinced the US needs an existential threat to be successful. Our history is one of ineptitude and international meddling (to put it nicely). We need a USSR or something like it to keep us focused on our own shit.

    • cantrevealname 5 minutes ago

      > We need a USSR or something like it

      Well good news: the PRC (China) will be the needed existential threat within 10 years.

spacephysics 2 hours ago

Unfortunately recent issues since the last couple elections have become partisan. We should stop using scientific institutions as means to political ends. Its bad for science in general, and sows distrust.

No one who reads scientific american supports X candidate will suddenly vote for them. However, people who see scientific american has begun to play in the political arena will think less of them. Myself and some friends have agreed they should stick with what they know, and not become a political instrument

  • dgacmu 5 minutes ago

    You must feel strongly about this given that you've chosen an article about the magazine Popular Science to rant about an entirely different magazine.

    It's almost like politics does, in fact, have a way of intruding in everything and everything has a touch of politics in it - even your comment on HN. :)

  • cjtrowbridge 32 minutes ago

    The naive idea that your views are somehow the inherently non-political and scientifically objective perspective is silly. The fact is that everything is political because there will always be people who build identities around denying reality and evidence, at the cost of everyone else.

  • minihat an hour ago

    I unsubscribed from Scientific American a few years back when they became a venue for political commentary instead of science. The opinion pieces try to masquerade as soft science. It's an insult to the actual scientists in their readership.

    If you're looking for a replacement, I picked up MIT Tech Review. It's not a stand-in replacement for what SciAm used to be, but scratches the same itch for me.

  • acdha an hour ago

    The other side of this is that politics won’t stay out of science. We have a number of areas where the scientific consensus has been well established but some people pretend otherwise for political reasons, and while in the past that was somewhat distributed on the political spectrum it has increasingly become concentrated in single parties. I don’t know how we can expect experts not to use their professional qualifications when rejecting false claims, especially when the alternatives being offered under false pretenses will cost lives and significant amounts of money.

wannabebarista 5 hours ago

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

throwaway48476 2 hours ago

Such archives are the vast untapped pool of AI training data.

  • jvm___ 2 hours ago

    Your 2025 Honda civic won't start? Have you tried cranking it with the handle in the hood or adjusting the choke?

veunes 6 hours ago

> 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)

pknerd 7 hours ago

wish the entire thing was downloadable

neuroelectron 5 hours ago

Not sure you're qualified to comment here if you don't already have all these downloaded somewhere on an external drive.