The founder of the Scientific American was one of those inventive Yankees whose versatility, “handiness,” and restless “projecting” life have made his type a legend. Rufus Porter was apprenticed to a shoemaker at fifteen, but cobbling was too dull for him; he liked better to play the fife for military companies on their field days and the fiddle for dancing parties. So he ran away from his cobbling. Then he was apprenticed to a house painter, and during the War of 1812 he painted gunboats and fifed for the Portland light infantry. Later he painted sleighs, beat the drum for soldiers, taught drumming and wrote a manual on the subject, and then became a country schoolmaster until his wandering feet and impatient mind took him away from the schoolhouse. In 1820 he invented a camera obscura with mirrors so arranged that with its aid he could draw a satisfactory portrait in fifteen minutes. This gave him a motive for the wandering life which he craved. Soon he added a revolving almanac to peddle as a sideline. Experiments with a horsepower boat ate up his savings, and he returned to portrait painting and later to landscape painting. But his itch for invention would not let him rest; and he produced in succession a cord-making machine, a patent clock, a steam carriage, a portable horsepower, a corn sheller, a churn, a washing machine (of course), a signal telegraph, a fire alarm, a revolving rifle, a flying ship, a trip hammer, a fog whistle, an engine lathe, a rotary plow, a portable house, and many other devices. Some of these were successful and gave him the funds to sink in failures.
In the intervals of invention, Porter edited the New York Mechanic in 1840, moving it to Boston the following year and calling it the American Mechanic; but he left it in 1842 to do some more inventing. He returned to the editorial field, however, in 1845; and while experimenting with electrotyping processes in New York he founded a weekly paper which he called the Scientific American. The first number, a four-page small folio at $2.00 a year, was issued on August 28, 1845. It was illustrated by a few woodcuts and bore the subtitle: “The Advocate of Industry and Journal of Mechanical and Other Improvements.” It was devoted primarily to new inventions, but it also contained from fragmentary essays on moral subjects “selected” from other periodicals, as well as some poetical “pieces,” the choice of which would reflect no credit on the editor’s literary judgement. Circulation amounted to only a few hundred. It would have been too much to expect of Porter that he should stick to his new paper for very long; and accordingly he sold it for a few hundred dollars in July 1846, although his name was carried as editor for ten months longer.
The purchasers were Orson Desaix Munn and Alfred Ely Beach. Beach was the son of Moses Y. Beach, famous editor and publisher of the New York Sun. The elder Beach was himself an inventor of importance, and the son inherited his mechanical interests and ability. When the younger Beach, not yet twenty-one, working with his father on the Sun, heard that the Scientific American was for sale, he suggested to his old schoolmate Munn, then conducting a mercantile business in a small Massachusetts town, that they should going into it together. Thus was the firm of Munn & Company organized, issuing its first number July 23, 1846.
As the publisher of a paper devoted chiefly to patents, Munn & Company found themselves in close contact with inventors of all sorts and besieged by questions about the methods of patenting and about patent law. A patent agency was accordingly setup. Unlike many others of its class, it was conducted on high principles and gave honest advice, and in the course of a decade or two it became a very prosperous concern and the largest agency of the kind in the world. Its relation to Scientific American was one of mutual helpfulness. When A.B. Wilson bought the model of his sewing machine (later the Wheeler and Wilson) to Munn & Company in 1849, it was written up for the American. In the same way, Thomas A. Edison got a good story on his new talking machine in 1877. The leading inventors of America were patrons of Munn & Company- Samuel F. B. Morse, Elias Howe, Captain James B. Eads, Captain John Ericsson, Dr. R. J. Gatling, Peter Cooper Hewitt, Thomas A. Edison. And even the obscure and unsuccessful inventions, of which the Scientific American published thousands (for every patron of Munn & Company got at least a few lines in the paper) were often interesting and sometimes significant in illustrating trends of experimentation.
The American featured these articles, and one of its most important departments was the weekly publication of the official list of patents, “with the claims annexed,” received directly from the United States Patent Office; but the contents of the paper were not limited to matters about inventions. The publishers had enlarged the weekly issue to eight pages, and a variety of information of mechanical and scientific nature was presented.
Frank Luther Mott, “A History of American Magazines” Volume II, 1850-1865, Scientific American- pgs.316-318
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