Posted on 12/01/2023 1:22:30 PM PST by Red Badger
Just three years after the iconic magazine abandoned its print version and went all-digital, Popular Science is now halting its subscription service entirely. The brand itself will live on — their site will still run tech stories and news articles, and they have two podcasts that will keep getting new episodes — but no more quarterly releases. While you can’t complain too much about a 151 year run, it’s still sad to see what was once such an influential publication slowly become just another cog in the content mill.
Started as a monthly magazine all the way back in 1872, Popular Science offered a hopeful vision of what was over the horizon. It didn’t present a fanciful version of what the next 100 years would look like, but rather, tried to read the tea leaves of cutting edge technology to offer a glimpse of what the next decade or so might hold. Flip through a few issues from the 1950s and 60s, and you won’t see pulpy stories about humanity conquering the stars or building a time machine. Instead the editors got readers ready for a day when they’d drive cars with warbird-derived turbochargers, and enjoy more powerful tools once transistor technology allowed for widespread use of small brushless motors. It wasn’t just armchair engineering either, issues would often include articles written by the engineers and researchers that were on the front lines.
But Popular Science wasn’t just about the future, it also provided plenty of contemporary content for those who liked to toy with technology at home. You could find articles about building your own test equipment, or setting up your own workshop. From woodworking to homebrew Geiger counters, there was a little something for everyone.
This focus on the hobbyist wasn’t without its downside. For the last decade or two, the magazine seemed to have more advertisements trying to sell the reader on the latest wiz-bang gadgetry than it did articles. Then again, there are precious few printed publications that didn’t suffer that particular fate.
Much like when MAKE went through its troubles back in 2019, we have to admit there’s a bit of irony at work here. The reality is, sites like the one you’re reading right now are the reason tech magazines have become a dying breed. But even if the age of print is coming to a close, we still have great respect for the seminal publications that came before the Internet took over our lives.
Surely many of the people in this community were inspired to pick up their first soldering iron by something they saw in a magazine like Popular Science, Byte, Popular Electronics, or Hands-On Electronics. We can only hope to do their legacy justice for the next generation.
Yes, I once had a subscription to Scientific American (and also Science News).
As a scientist (a real one) I have observed that the SA has wholly abandoned the scientific method, and is no more "scientific" than the Daily Worker or the National Enquirer.
I will always remember this from that magazine...
POPULAR SCIENCE, Feb 1980..
PS/What’s News ....
page 73
Changing the weather intentionally or otherwise weather modification..(Earth cooling vs Greenhouse effect)
“Do you suppose we can learn enough, soon enough, to pull off a balancing act with the CO2 blanket saving us from another ice age?”
It was a fun read for a kid back in the 60’s and early 70’s…a magazine that you, your dad and your uncle would all read. I’m sure it all became propaganda, like everything in the new perverse America. That and the end of print magazines generally undoubtedly did it in. But 50 years ago, it was rather fun and informative.
Dang. I was waiting for the story to come out, “Build your own AI sex robot”.
Popular Science and Radio Shack,two more parts of my youth gone...
Me too. Climate change, climate change, climate change. Same for Nat Geo.
I stopped reading Popular Science and Scientific American way back when they went woke. I travel for a living, and used to read SciAm religiously on the plane. I clearly remember the very last time I read SciAm. They had an article comparing and contrasting President Bush, Versus Al Gore on climate change. They magazine repeatedly referred to President Bush simply as “Bush”, yet repeatedly referred to Al Gore using the honorific “Senator”. I could see the bias on the walls and never went back.
I stopped reading it during the Reagan years. They had article after article “proving” that deployment of Pershing missiles in Europe would start WWIII. The missiles got deployed if WWIII started I must have slept through it. I didn’t renew my subscription. A subscription that I had had since I was 13. Something my Dad got me for my 13th birthday. I occasionally borrowed the magazine and read it to see if had returned to it previous format. It didn’t so eventually I never bother with even reading it occasionally.
There are still a few radio shacks. There’s one about 30 miles from us.
Popular science was cool before they went liberal.
My late father had some longterm subscription that continued for years after he passed. I'd enjoyed the magazine since I'd been able to read, until the nitwit editor of the time devoted an entire issue to the grifter Al Gore and the global warming hoax. I let my mother know that she need not renew the subscription when it came up. Their circulation numbers were always well behind rival Popular Mechanics, and print has been in a long downward spiral, but I regard this in part as suicide.
For reasons I don’t recall, I never really liked Popular Science.
A significant amount of “science”, particularly medical “science” although no discipline has been spared, has devolved into political “science”.
yup, the big three
🤪🤪🤪🤪🤪🤪🤔
They are WOKE too..............
I had subs to both!...............
High Times?......................
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