Celebrating Science

In 1845 James K. Polk succeeded John Tyler, Jr., as the 11th president. The U.S. annexed Texas as the 28th state, and the young nation’s  “manifest destiny” to occupy all of North America became a popular ideal. The industrial revolution was burgeoning, easing people’s lives with mechanical marvels. By this time, for instance,

Cyrus McCormick had created a labor-saving reaper for crops. And with a promise to explain “New Inventions, Scientific Principles, and Curious Works,” the painter and inventor Rufus Porter introduced

the first issue of a broadsheet called The Scientific American on August 28, 1845. Porter was “a mechanical Johnny Appleseed sowing seed of new and ingenious ideas as he traveled through New

England and abroad through his journals,” wrote Jean Lipman in Rufus Porter,

Yankee Pioneer (Clarkson N. Potter, 1968); you can learn more about him at

the Rufus Porter Museum in Bridgton, Me. Porter took out more than 100 patents,

but his best-known innovation is his revolver mechanism, which he sold in 1844 to Samuel Colt for $100. Scientific American reflected his broad interests.