This Month in the Archives

Dive into 172 years of groundbreaking research
 
Scientific American

This Month in the Archives
With an All Access Subscription, you have exclusive access to 172 years’ of groundbreaking articles by leading experts in their fields. In this month’s newsletter, we celebrate the joy of summer with boats and bicycles together (really… together). Also, while e-cigs and vaping are all the rage today, tobacco use is still common worldwide - it’s a story with deep roots. Lastly, in honor of the summer’s blockbuster action movies, we reflect on the evolution of robots.
 
 
Melding Bicycles and Boats
1986: High-performance hydrodynamics and bicycle technology
Not long after the bicycle was developed in the late 19th century, the technology was quickly adapted for “messing about in small boats” as well as for more intellectually rigorous pursuits.
  • October 1881: “Velocipede boat” complete with giant swan—which also screens the sweaty hired pedaler from the gentlefolk—graces the Boston Public Garden lake.
  • June 1895: A gentleman inventor from Madrid rigged a “nautical bicycle”—a pontoon boat with a stern paddlewheel.
  • December 1910: What’s old is new again as this “unique” water bicycle takes to the Hudson.
  • December 1986: “Human-Powered Watercraft” traces the physics and lineage of fast travel by small boat.
Tobacco
1995: Tobacco smoking has become a worldwide habit
Scientific American hasn’t run advertisements for tobacco products for decades, but we have often reported on the various aspects of personal responsibility, medical orthodoxy and the big business of tobacco.
  • December 1871: The editors wrestle between “the natural desire to find [tobacco smoking] a harmless practice” and a conclusion that it is “an unmitigated evil.”
  • February 1907: The tobacco business: most of this weed grown in the Philippines, on fields in the Cagayan Valley, is exported to China, Japan and Europe.
  • July 1962: The charts and graphs won’t sway smokers, but “There is no longer any doubt that cigarette smokers have a higher death rate than nonsmokers.”
  • May 1995: Smoking became so widespread—driven in part by aggressive advertising worldwide—that we published “The Global Tobacco Epidemic.”
Robots
1883: Chess-playing “automaton” was (fraudulently) powered by a person
Robots fascinate us, serve us, scare us. Researchers have evolved from producing robots that can do specific tasks, such as playing chess, to figuring out how to program more human emotions.
  • February 1883: The chess-playing “automaton Az Rah” in Bordeaux turns out to be a fake: a hidden (and limber) 18-year-old provided the brains and motions.
  • January 1929: Big Business introduces “Robots for Salesmen.” Yep, vending machines count as robots.
  • June 2006: Japanese roboticist creates the “world’s most beautiful android.” And thereby raises a lot of questions about how humans live and communicate.
  • January 2017: There’s a very real human fear of robots “taking control." How and why to program empathy, ethics and, in this article, disobedience?
Current Issue
The world that we perceive with our senses—the “macroscale” one—obeys physical rules. But the subatomic, quantum, world has different rules. So where is the boundary between the two realms? And what happens when we try and send an explorer from one realm to the other?
READ THIS ISSUE


Enjoy the journey!
Dan Schlenoff, editor of “50, 100 & 150 Years Ago”
 
 
 

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