Starting this month, we’re celebrating our 170th anniversary with a series of editorial activities that will run through the end of the year, and we invite you to participate. Stay tuned.
Scientific American readers have curious minds and a shared passion for lifelong learning. In the inaugural issue, Porter noted that the editors would foster student development. “As a family newspaper,” he wrote in his introduction, “it will convey more useful intelligence to children and young people, than five times its cost in school instruction.” (At the time, that cost was $2 annually, worth more than $60 in 2015 dollars.) Today, with national concerns about educating our next generation to succeed in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), we still report on these topics. (See our special section on “Building the 21st-Century Learner.”) And I deeply hope, as a lovely 1911 editorial in this magazine put it, that we may continue to inspire with tales that evoke “the inherent charm and fascination of science.”
