Tomorrow (July 22) would have been the 100th birthday of Dennis Flanagan, longtime editor of Scientific American magazine, born July 22, 1919. Flanagan edited the magazine for 37 years and is generally credited with reviving it.
Before joining Scientific American in 1947, Flanagan had been science editor of Life magazine. In his 1988 book, "Flanagan's Version," he recalled that, "Any nonscientist reading these pages may be comforted in knowing that my qualifications for those jobs were nil. I was an English-major type and destitute of any formal knowledge in hard subjects such as physics and chemistry. Lacking any background, how was I to gauge the importance of scientific topics—to choose the ones that had to be covered in the magazine? Over the years I arrived at the conclusion that the best touchstone was whether or not the subject came as a surprise. After all, if it came as a surprise to me, it would come as a surprise to any equally innocent person."
Inducted into the Magazine Editors' Hall of Fame in 1999, Dennis Flanagan died in 2005 at age 85 .
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