Popular Mechanics

Since 1902, Popular Mechanics has been published as a monthly magazine that describes the wonders of twentieth-century technology for the lay reader in a "gee-whiz" style, with do-it-yourself home-workshop projects thrown in for good measure. Debuting just a year before the Wright Brothers' flight at Kitty Hawk, when automobiles and motion pictures were still recent innovations, Popular Mechanics has chronicled the breakthroughs of the most productive century in the history of science and mechanics. The periodical made its appearance in Chicago in January 1902 as Popular Mechanics and did not become Popular Mechanics Magazine until 1910, by which time it had already absorbed another small technical publication by the name of Technical World. Its readership grew from only five subscribers in 1902, plus a few readers paying five cents a copy at the newsstand, to a worldwide circulation of 1,428,356 by 1998. In 1947, a Spanish language edition (Mecanica Popular) was produced, along with several other foreign language editions in French, Danish, and Swedish.

The story of its founding tells as much about American ingenuity as its content. Popular Mechanics Magazine was founded by Henry Haven Windsor, Sr., a former city editor of the Marshalltown, Iowa, newspaper, and the son of an Iowa minister. A strong advocate of science and mechanics, Windsor saw the need for a periodical that could present clearly written technical material to the average man (Popular Mechanics continued its focus on a male readership into the 1990s). Prior to his work as founder and editor of Popular Mechanics, Windsor had worked for the Chicago City Railway Company in the 1880s. There he started a trade magazine, the Street Railway Review, which he edited from 1892-1901. Researching articles for the Review, Windsor once spent six months disguised as an operator of an old-fashioned grip car so he could acquire firsthand understanding of the problems of operators.

Windsor brought this same passion for mechanical detail and technical know-how to Popular Mechanics. Initially, he wrote every article and sold every advertisement himself for the fledgling eight-page weekly, which by 1904 had grown to 100 pages. Its rapid growth in both size and circulation was testimony to Windsor's vision for the magazine and his ability to tap into a previously unrecognized market. Although Windsor died in 1924, the magazine remained under the control and editorship of the Windsor family through several generations. It became part of the Hearst Corporation in the mid-1950s.

Although developments in science and technology spawned other successful publications, such as the earlier Popular Science Monthly (1872), Mechanics Illustrated (1928), followed by Science Digest, Popular Homecraft, Popular Electronics, and others, none gained the wide appeal of Popular Mechanics Magazine. During World War II, the magazine was popular among American G.I.s, who sometimes wrote letters home to request that family members respond to job-training advertisements for them, in anticipation of their return to civilian life. With its practical, down-to-earth, hands-on advice, its focus on "how-to" articles, its clear writing and copious illustrations, the periodical's success lay in its narrow focus, appealing directly to the independent, do-it-yourself reader. With its slogan, "Written So You Can Understand It," Popular Mechanics during these years strove to appeal to the general, nonacademic reader who wanted to read about new "modern" advances during the golden years of American science and technology. The publication was also famous during these years for its classified ads section, which offered hundreds of money-making schemes every month, ranging from home locksmithing equipment to furniture building kits to such "untechnical" pursuits as songwriting, stuffing envelopes, and selling patent medicine nostrums.

Especially from the 1930s through the 1950s, Popular Mechanics anticipated developments in astronautics by publishing futuristic articles that offered hints about the evolution of rocket science and space exploration, some of which were dismissed as speculative "Buck Rogers" fiction but that were later proven to have been prescient. During the 1970s, when the omnipotence of science and technology began to fade in the minds of some Americans, the magazine and others like it were criticized by environmentalists and others for advancing a worldview based on technological domination of the planet and the exploitation of nonrenewable resources. In the 1980s, Popular Mechanics devoted many pages to covering new developments in consumer electronics and personal computers. By the end of the 1990s, the magazine was featuring such articles as "Half Man, Half Machine: New Breakthroughs in Bionics Perfect Battery-Powered Eyes, Ears, Limbs and Muscles," as well as buyers' guides to new cars and trucks, new lawn mowers, and gardening tools. These articles reflected perspectives of the late twentieth century, with awareness of current breakthroughs in medical technology as well as attention to consumer information.

Since its beginnings, a distinctive feature of Popular Mechanics has been its emphasis on "descriptive illustration." As Roland E. Wolseley pointed out, Henry Windsor issued a policy statement when he founded the publication: "Most magazines use illustrated articles. We do not. We use described pictures." At the end of the 1990s, articles in Popular Mechanics remained profusely illustrated with detailed analyses of machine parts and step-by-step procedures for everything from replacing roof shingles to performing periodic washing machine maintenance.

In the late 1990s, Joe Oldham was editor-in-chief of Popular Mechanics Magazine, which by then had its own website, called "PM. Zone," and a television version of Popular Mechanics for Kids. Offering a detailed chronicle of mechanical and technological innovation throughout the twentieth century, the magazine was as familiar to working-and middle-class Americans as Harper's Weekly, with its illustrated coverage of the Civil War, had been to those of the nineteenth century.

—Lolly Ockerstrom

Further Reading:

Mott, Frank Luther. A History of American Magazines 1885-1905, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1957.

Peterson, Theodore. Magazines in the Twentieth Century. Urbana, Illinois, University of Illinois Press, 1956.

"Popular Mechanics Website."http://www.popularmechanics.com. June 1999.

Wolseley, Roland E. Understanding Magazines. 2nd edition. Ames, Iowa State University Press, 1969.