Scientific American is a popular science magazine, published (first weekly and later monthly) since August 28, 1845, making it one of the oldest continuously published magazines in the United States. It brings articles about new and innovative research to the amateur and lay audience.

Scientific American (informally abbreviated to "SciAm") had a monthly circulation of roughly 555,000 US and 90,000 international as of December 2005. It is not a peer-reviewed scientific journal, such as Nature; rather, it is a forum where scientific theories and discoveries are explained to a broader audience. In the past scientists interested in fields outside their own areas of expertise made up the magazine's target audience. Now, however, the publication is aimed at educated general readers who are interested in scientific issues. The magazine American Scientist covers similar ground but at a level more suitable for the professional science audience, similar to the older style of Scientific American.

History

The magazine was founded by Rufus M. Porter, who grew up in Bridgton, Maine, as a single-page newsletter, and throughout its early years Scientific American put much emphasis on reports of what was going on at the US patent office. It reported on a broad range of inventions that includes perpetual motion machines, an 1849 device for buoying vessels by Abraham Lincoln, and the universal joint which now finds place in nearly every automobile manufactured. Current issues feature a "this date in history" section, featuring an article originally published 50, 100, and 150 years ago — where often-humorous, un-scientific, or otherwise noteworthy gems of science history are featured.

Porter sold the newsletter in 1846 to Alfred Ely Beach and Orson Desaix Munn I, and until 1948 it remained owned by Munn & Company. Under the second Orson Desaix Munn III, grandson of the first, 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 was dying. Three partners who were planning on starting a new popular science magazine, to be called The Sciences, instead purchased the assets of the old Scientific American and put its name on the designs they had created for their new magazine. Thus the partners -- publisher Gerard H. Piel, editor Dennis K. Flanagan, and general manager Donald H. Miller, Jr. -- created essentially a new magazine, the Scientific American magazine of the second half of the twentieth century. Miller retired in 1979, Flanagan and Piel in 1984, when Gerard Piel's son Jonathan became president and editor; circulation had grown fifteenfold since 1948. In 1986 it was sold to the Holtzbrinck group of Germany, who have owned it since. Donald Miller died in December, 1998, Gerard Piel in September 2004 and Dennis Flanagan in January 2005. John Rennie is the current editor-in-chief.