About Compressed Air MagazineIndustrial journals often don’t survive to celebrate their 104 th anniversary. Compressed Air Magazine is an exception. Its entire history reflects the evolution of an industry and the world around it. Compressed Air Magazine was created by William Lawrence Saunders to promote the capabilities of compressed air - a new technology in 1896. He felt air power was coming of age and needed a magazine devoted to it. “It appeared to us,” wrote Saunders many years later, “that compressed air had a field of usefulness capable of much industrial growth, and as there were few books on the subject, and no journals devoted to its interests, we started this little paper to give vent to an old-time hobby. We have never presumed to pose as experts, or as professors on this important subject, but we have thought that our everyday contact with compressed air machinery and men might give us a certain amount of practical information on the subject and that this would be of interest to the public. Papers are published from time to time in the various engineering journals illustrating certain uses of compressed air, and as these papers are always in our files, we are able to select those of interest and embody them in this publication together. ...And as our readers are not likely to have either the time or the opportunity to look into all papers to see what is said about compressed air, we have undertaken to do this work for them.” After Compressed Air Magazine discontinued in 2000, we received lots of calls from our readers demanding to reach the archives to refresh their memory and use articles as a reference. As a result of these requests, we decided to convert Compressed Air Magazine articles into electronic format and made available to our readers. When William Lawrence Saunders created Compressed Air Magazine, he also suggested that the cover be red. As a long tradition, red is the color that appeared on the cover. It has been there since 1920, surviving changing trends in graphics, new editors with the urge to imprint the magazine with their own marks, and variations on our mission statement. Embedded in this spot of color are the stories of personalities, the euphoria of good times and the worries of economic depressions, and, always, the support from management. Continuing the tradition, we embrace color RED and the original idea of Compressed Air Magazine, as founder William Lawrence Saunders simply stated in 1896, “a monthly publication devoted to the useful application of compressed air with a little occasional original material.” |
