Scientific American

Scientific American (often called SciAm or SA) is a U.S. magazine that covers science for a general audience. Over its history, it has published work from many notable scientists, including Albert Einstein and Nikola Tesla, and has featured more than 150 Nobel Prize winners. First printed in 1845, it holds the record as the longest-running magazine in the United States that has never stopped publication. Until June 2026, it was owned by Springer Nature; that month, it was sold to LabX Media Group.

The magazine began as a four-page weekly newspaper in New York City, founded by inventor and publisher Rufus Porter. Its first issue came out on August 28, 1845. In its early days, it focused heavily on news from the U.S. Patent Office and covered a wide range of inventions—including perpetual motion machines, a device Abraham Lincoln designed in 1860 for buoying vessels, and the universal joint, now common in nearly every car. Each current issue includes a “this date in history” feature that pulls excerpts from articles published 50, 100, and 150 years earlier, highlighting humorous stories, mistaken theories, and important scientific advances. It was a weekly until November 1921, when it became a monthly.

Porter sold the publication just ten months after founding it to Alfred Ely Beach (son of media magnate Moses Yale Beach) and Orson Desaix Munn. The magazine stayed in the Beach and Munn families under Munn & Company until 1948. During that time, editors and co-owners included Frederick C. Beach, his son Stanley Yale Beach, Charles Allen Munn, and his nephew Orson Desaix Munn II. Under Orson Munn’s grandson, Orson Desaix Munn III, the magazine became more of a “workbench” publication, similar to the later version of Popular Science.

After World War II, the magazine declined. In 1948, three partners who had been planning a new science magazine called *The Sciences* bought the assets of the old *Scientific American* instead and applied their own designs to it. Those partners—publisher Gerard Piel, editor Dennis Flanagan, and general manager Donald H. Miller Jr.—essentially created a new magazine. Miller retired in 1979, and Flanagan and Piel retired in 1984, when Piel’s son Jonathan became president and editor. By then, circulation had grown fifteen times since 1948.

In 1986, the magazine was sold to Germany’s Holtzbrinck Publishing Group, which owned it until the Springer Nature merger. In fall 2008, it was placed under 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; she left in September 2019. Laura Helmuth took over as editor-in-chief in April 2020. In 2009, the publisher told collegiate libraries that yearly subscription prices would jump nearly 500% for print and 50% for online access, to $1,500 per year.

The magazine’s offices have included 37 Park Row in Manhattan and the Woolworth Building, where it moved in 1915, two years after the building was completed. At the time, the Woolworth Building was one of the city’s first skyscrapers and the tallest 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 bought by LabX Media Group, while *Spektrum* went to GeraNova Bruckmann. The Writers Guild of America East unit at the publication criticized the sale and the layoff of 15 staff members—including most of the unit’s organizers—as motivated by union-busting and censorship.

The first foreign-language edition appeared in 1890 in Spanish, titled *La América Científica é Industrial*, but it ended in the early 1900s. In 1968, the Italian edition *Le Scienze* launched, followed by the Japanese *Nikkei Science* in 1971. Later international editions included the Spanish *Investigación y Ciencia* (1976), French *Pour la Science* (1977), German *Spektrum der Wissenschaft* (1978), and Russian *V Mire Nauki*. The Polish edition *Świat Nauki* began in 1991. In 2002, the Taiwanese edition *Scientist* (in traditional Chinese) was established in Taipei, and the German edition launched *Gehirn & Geist*, focusing on psychology and neuroscience. Italy’s *Mente & Cervello* followed in 2003, and the Dutch edition debuted that same year, published by Cascade in Antwerp.

Editors of *Scientific American* have included Rufus Porter (1845–1847), Orson Desaix Munn (1847–1907), Charles Allen Munn (1907–1924), Orson Desaix Munn II (1924–1947), Dennis Flanagan (1947–1984), Jonathan Piel (1984–1994), John Rennie (1994–2009), Mariette DiChristina (2009–2019), Laura Helmuth (2020–2024), and David M. Ewalt (2025–present).

In 2013, Danielle N. Lee, a female scientist who blogged for *Scientific American*, was called a “whore” in an email by an editor at the science website Biology Online after she refused to write professional content without pay. Lee posted her response on the *Scientific American* blog.