I see that there’s an article that mentions an ancestor of mine (and it’s about “Super Zeppelins” too!) but it’s 1916.  Now I’m going to have to get off my ass and go to the library.  Thanks, Boing Boing!

Plus, we’ve got over a thousand of the first pages (aka covers), courtesy of Steve, on the magazineart.org site, at http://www.magazineart.org/main.php/v/technical/scientificamerican/

Both of these places will still be in operation after the end of the month (!).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beach_Pneumatic_Transit

Moustaches were apparently the mullets of the 1800s:
Mouitacl1″ •• After  all  that  has been  said  against the moustache  we  would  not  condemn a man  8S a conth’med  villian because  he  wears  a  long black  or  red whisk  between  his  nose  and mouth.  It’s a  sorry  sigbt,  we know,  but we would  rather  pity  the  wearer  or  give  him a  passing  kick,  than go  so  far  as to  advise  a refusal  to  him  of  a trlftlng  loan  to  buy a glus of beer.  They  are very  useful  to sop  up  ”ra­vy  or  bu tter  at  the  d inner  table.http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v4/n19/pdf/scientificamerican01271849-147g.pdf

But to this day, the best thing anyone interested in science can do is obtain collected editions of the old Martin Gardner and Amateur Scientist columns. Those were golden.

So make sure to polish your brass rimmed goggles. It’s gonna be a long ride.

It started as a newspaper, became a bland magazine after the turn of the century, then went through a radical redesign after WWII, becoming a modern, stylish journal that was recognizably related to the mag we have today.

There is some FASCINATING stuff, both technology-wise and socio-historically.

Like, letters to the editor during and after the Civil War. The magazine was progressive and modern and pro-Union; this rubbed some loyal readers the wrong way. After the war there was a call for mutual respect.

There were two eruptions of the Water Engine scam. Not, in these cases, gasoline-to-water pills, but charlatans trying to get suckers to invest in a steam engine that ran on “cold” water vapor. (Paraphrasing: “Imagine the savings in fuel if locomotives ran on cold steam! The coal trust doesn’t want us to know the truth!”) SciAm warned people not to fall for it.

Notices of a government pamphlet on how to get cheap fats into your diet. Healthful, nutritious fat. Mmmm, fat!

The “recent patents” page had one entry, mid-19th-century, that fascinated me: A remotely reporting thermometer. It sent out temperature readings by telegraph. It wouldn’t have been too hard to make a remotely reporting wind gauge and baometer. Imagine if those units were stuck in train depots across the country, with the feeds going to a room full of maps and chalkboards. Steampunk-age storm-system tracking!

I used to have a subscription to Popular Science, which is by no means a bad magazine, but after reading a few issues of Scientific American I felt almost ashamed to have been reading PopSci all that time instead.

Where most popular science (the genre, not the specific magazine) periodicals mostly just inform the public what’s going on in the world of science and why it matters, Scientific American reaches out and teaches you about the very same developments. It feels like the difference between reading a table of contents and actually reading the textbook.

http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v101/n5/pdf/scientificamerican07311909-71b.pdf

Here’s a paper at the New York Times about this theory:

http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=F30E15F73D5914728DDDA10994DF405B898CF1D3

Now available: 1845-1909 archive collection

Now through November 30, 2011, you and your patrons will enjoy complimentary access to more than 75,000 articles from classic issues featured in the Scientific American 1845-1909 archive collection. This collection is a treasure trove that includes 65 years of scientific history, breakthroughs, inventions, and triumphs.

Still pretty damned cool, though.