PM’S Greatest Hits

We trawl the archives to bring you some favourites from more than a century of your favourite magazine

A SET OF PLAIN white locking cabinets in the Popular Mechanics US head offices houses the PM archives. The editors there pull these hardbound copies – big, black things with gold lettering, like volumes of a mail-order encyclopaedia – off the shelves with surprising regularity. Their South African counterparts have a smaller, unbound and musty but surprisingly comprehensive collection dating back to the early 1900s to choose from. Sometimes the act of thumbing through the archives is to find a dusty Shop Note that still works, to put together our monthly Time Machine feature, or to check on a prescient old story whose subject is finally news. But much of the time, it’s just to smile. This is a magazine that has predicted flying cars in no fewer than six separate cover stories. We once suggested rejuvenating a sputtering ballpoint pen by tying it to a string and swinging it around until centrifugal force pushed the ink to the tip. We wrote about photography by carrier pigeon in prewar Germany.

The thing you’ll notice about pigeon photography, by the way, is that it looks just like drone footage, 80 years before anyone knew what a drone was. We pore over our archives, in other words, to be inspired. In this selection from the first-ever collection of Popular Mechanics’ greatest hits, we share that inspiration with you. Over the following pages, we present things to build, cook, try doing, learn about, and marvel at – 116 years’ worth, from a vast and sometimes genuinely odd assortment of topics. Popular Mechanics is, and always has been, an exhaustive review of the things that fascinate us and fuel our optimism about the future.

In that spirit, we’ve published the thoughts of curious novelists, eminent scientists, and American presidents. (Yes, plural.) “In the years before I was born, commentators declared the American frontier closed,” Ronald Reagan wrote in these pages in July 1986. “No more land grabs, no more gold rushes.” Popular Mechanics arrived in those same years. The first issue is from 11 January 1902, and isn’t much more than a pamphlet. There is a copy in the PM US office with yellowed pages that flake around the edges like poorly applied paint. It is 16 pages long, monochrome, and carries only nine photographs and four advertisements. But for its readers, a claustrophobic world must have been nearly impossible to imagine. They read stories about learning languages, elementary electricity, quicksand, techniques for cleaning pipes, a record-breaking electric car and the rise of telephones. American life, they knew, was in bloom. So of course Reagan was just teeing up his real point. “Americans need frontiers,” he said. “Close one down and we open up another.” He wrote of the space station the country was planning to build and today, as you read this, the International Space Station, a frontier outpost on the edge of the unknown, orbits overhead. “What now exists only in our imagination will someday become a tool for greater prosperity,” Reagan said. Indeed. We’ll continue to build up and out and in deep space and cyberspace. And at each new outpost, you can be certain Popular Mechanics will be the village rag, reporting, as it always has, on a world shaped by curious, interested, innovative people – a frontier that will never be closed or tamed. PM