Friday, December 23, 2005

Makezine has an Ancestor

I am very impressed and enthralled by ‘Make’. The quarterly magazine, published by O’Reilly, shows us how to make wonderfully useful things.

Rummaging through my father’s old magazines, I found a big bunch of early issues of ‘Practical Mechanics’. Here is a cover from one dated march 1937. So you see this is not a new idea, just that we have much more technology available to us in this century.

The cover story in this 1937 issue of ‘Practical Mechanics’ was Profitable Printing at Home. The article is, in part, a review of a small printing press invented by Donald Aspinall. I quote:

In 1922 he built his first machine, found it satisfactory, and put it on the market. It was named the "Adana" -an anagram of the initial letters of the inventor’s name ....

furthermore...

You might be interested to see this advertisement from inside this same issue.

I don't think 'Practical Mechanics' still exists but another similar magazine is 'Popular Mechanics' which does.