About Science and Mechanics

Science and Mechanics

Science and Mechanics was an American popular-science and how-it-works monthly published in New York from 1929 to 1976. It began in Hugo Gernsback's publishing stable as Everyday Mechanics, became Everyday Science and Mechanics in 1931, and took its best-known title in March 1937, which it kept for nearly four decades. Across those changes of name, publisher, and format, it remained a magazine of practical science: experiments readers could try, devices they could build, and new inventions and machines explained through plans, diagrams, and photographs.

Founding as Everyday Mechanics, 1929

The magazine was founded, apparently in 1929, as Everyday Mechanics. Its founder's stable was that of Hugo Gernsback, the Luxembourg-born New York publisher who had reshaped American popular-technical publishing with a succession of radio, electrical, and science magazines. Bibliographies of Gernsback's magazines list Everyday Mechanics among his titles, and the magazine was issued in New York by his Continental Publications. The founding date matters to its character: it was a Depression-era launch, begun in the year of the Wall Street Crash, and its premise — that readers wanted inexpensive, practical knowledge they could use themselves — suited a decade in which making, mending, and understanding machines at home carried economic as well as recreational value.

Everyday Science and Mechanics, 1931–1937

With the October 1931 issue the title changed to Everyday Science and Mechanics, broadening the stated remit from mechanics alone to science more generally. Gernsback edited the magazine through this period. The Hugo Gernsback Papers at Syracuse University preserve his editorials for the magazine from 1930 to 1936, along with individual pieces such as an "Express Super-Liner" article in October 1933, a piece called "The Hypnotone" in April 1934, and "The Flame Tank" in January 1936 — titles that capture the magazine's mixture of futuristic speculation and practical mechanics. Catalogue records for dated issues fill out the picture: a December 1933 issue, with a cover by the artist Paul, carried short science and engineering articles including a piece attributed to Nikola Tesla; a February 1934 issue is recorded with a cover and film story tied to the motion picture The Invisible Man, showing how readily the magazine connected popular science with popular entertainment.

Contents and Character in the Gernsback Years

Surviving issues from the mid-1930s show a consistent editorial formula. The February 1936 issue, edited by Gernsback, contained his own article on an air police patrol, and was filled, in a contemporary catalogue description, with ideas, designs, and diagrams throughout. The June 1936 issue — its title page noting the combination with Everyday Mechanics — ranged across new devices and the latest patents, features on the liner Queen Mary and on garments made of glass, an account of reconstructing facial features from skulls, guidance on microscopy for the beginner, and build-it-yourself projects including a demagnetizing coil and a siren for a small town or camp, alongside the mechanics of stage magic. Covers in this period were painted by Frank R. Paul, the defining illustrator of Gernsback's magazines, whose work appeared on the April 1936 issue. In format the magazine was a large monthly of roughly eight and a half by eleven and a half inches; issues in early 1936 ran to about 48 to 52 pages at a cover price of ten cents.

Becoming Science and Mechanics, 1937

With the March 1937 issue, the word "Everyday" was dropped, and the magazine settled into the title it would carry for the rest of its life: Science and Mechanics. By December 1937 an issue recorded as whole number 63 ran to 96 pages at fifteen cents, filled with plans and diagrams for do-it-yourself projects — evidence that the shorter title came with a larger magazine, not a diminished one. Gernsback's direct editorial association belongs to the magazine's first decade; his archived editorials end in 1936, and the title's long subsequent life was led by other hands and other publishing companies, a pattern common among Gernsback launches, several of which long outlived his involvement.

The War Years and the 1940s

The magazine published continuously through the Second World War era and the later 1940s. The antiquarian record preserves a steady trail of dated issues — among them December 1940, February and August 1945, December 1946, a combined February–March 1948 number, and issues from April and December 1949 — demonstrating that the title survived the wartime years in print and remained active as the postwar period began. Its subject remained what its title promised: applied science and mechanical know-how for the general reader, in a market where its competitors included the far larger Popular Mechanics and Popular Science, against which Science and Mechanics persisted as a smaller, durable alternative through the 1940s.

The Postwar Magazine: Editors and Publishers of the 1950s

By the early 1950s the magazine was appearing under the imprint of the Science and Mechanics Publishing Company. A February 1953 issue is catalogued with V. D. Angerman as editor — a name also attached to the magazine at the end of the 1930s — and an April 1952 issue, the second number of its twenty-third volume, is recorded with Volta Torrey as editor, published in New York, running to more than two hundred pages with black-and-white photographs and illustrations. The October 1957 issue shows the formula intact a generation after the founding: it introduced readers to the new Ford Edsel, carried instruction on flying the Cessna 172, and ranged across aviation, automobiles, hardware, and science. The continuity is the story of these years — the same promise of explained technology and practical instruction, updated from Depression-era home workshops to the cars and light aircraft of the 1950s.

Davis Publications and the Later Years

By 1960 the magazine was issued by Davis Publications; the Internet Archive's copy of the February 1960 issue, credited to that publisher, is described there as containing articles on building things and understanding things — as concise a statement of the magazine's mission, thirty years on, as its first issues could have offered. A handbook-format presence accompanied the magazine in the early 1960s, with Science & Mechanics handbook issues recorded from 1961 to 1964. Covers of the mid-1960s billed subjects such as slot racing and the search for life in space. Issues from the early 1970s — recorded from February and June 1971 and from 1973 and 1974 — were published by P. D. Davis Publication and concentrated on automobiles, aviation, and engineering, with automotive contributors of the period. The magazine's run ended in 1976, forty-seven years after its founding.

Place in American Popular-Science Publishing

Science and Mechanics was never the largest American popular-science magazine, and it has left a thinner documentary trail than its famous competitors — no single history of the title exists, and its record must be reconstructed from publisher bibliographies, the founder's archived papers at Syracuse University, library and archive copies, and the catalogued evidence of surviving issues. That record nonetheless establishes a clear significance. It was one of the longest-lived titles to emerge from Gernsback's second great publishing venture of 1929, the same season that produced his Radio-Craft and his science fiction magazines; it carried the Gernsback formula of illustrated, diagram-driven, hands-on science from the Depression through the Second World War and into the age of the family car and the private aeroplane; and it demonstrated, across three titles and several publishing houses, the durability of a simple editorial bargain — that ordinary readers would keep buying a magazine that showed them how things worked and how to make things themselves.

Legacy

The magazine ceased publication in 1976, the year that closed the long postwar era of the American how-to monthly in its classic form. Its legacy is preserved in the physical survival of its issues: archive copies such as the February 1960 number circulate freely for study, Gernsback's editorials for its formative years are catalogued among his papers, and dated issues from 1933 to 1974 remain staples of the vintage-magazine trade, through which its contents — Tesla's name on a 1933 contents page, Paul's painted covers, plans for coils and sirens, introductions to the Edsel and lessons on the Cessna 172 — can still be traced issue by issue. For the WorldNM directory, it is catalogued under its longest-held and final title, Science and Mechanics, with its earlier identities as Everyday Mechanics and Everyday Science and Mechanics recorded as the first chapters of a single, continuous run.