And the old bottles in which it was decanted would still be revered.

Readers could also be reassured that while the latest from natural selection theory, plate tectonics, or paleontology might seem like dramatic upheavals of the known world, these would drape gently over old schema, showing merely novel aspects of “the infinite wisdom of the Creator,” as Youmans put it elsewhere. With those missives from the scientific vanguard, subscribers were tacitly promised at least passive participation in mankind’s quasi-divine march toward a more humane, rational, successful, and peacefully organized future. Whereas Scientific American, founded in 1845, focused on applied science’s gadgetry and news from the US Patents Office, Popular Science offered middle-class nonprofessionals distillations of Darwin, Huxley, Spencer, Lyell, and others. Youmans, who published and lectured for general audiences on subjects ranging from the laws of thermodynamics to “The Science of Prohibition” and “The Culture Demanded by Modern Life,” admonished readers that “whoever desires to be intelligent as to contemporary movements in the world of thought…must give attention to the course of scientific inquiry.”īy “science” Youmans meant both a limitless, grandly ecumenical way of being in the world-anyone applying “continuous intelligent observation” to biology, chemistry, political theory, or “the characters of men” was producing science-and something quite specific, namely an Anglo-American Victorian combination of nascent evolutionary biology with strong Transcendentalist and liberal Protestant undertones.

One hundred and fifty years ago, the magazine Popular Science launched its first issue, edited by the optimistic polymath Edward Youmans.

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