Mergers
Hugo Gernsback's Electro Importing Company catalogs had elaborate instructions on how to use the electrical and radio parts they sold. These catalogs spawned Modern Electrics in April 1908 and the magazine had over 100,000 readers by 1911. In March 1913, Gernsback sold the magazine and the Modern Publishing Company to his business partner, Orland Ridenour. Modern Publishing acquired Electrician and Mechanic and merged it with Modern Electrics. The new magazine, Modern Electrics and Mechanics, was published from January 1914 to June 1914. Gernsback started a new magazine, The Electrical Experimenter, in May 1913.
Popular Electricity Publishing of Chicago merged Popular Electricity in Plain English (founded May 1908) with World's Advance in September 1913. Modern Publishing acquired Popular Electricity and World's Advance and combined it with Modern Electrics and Mechanics in July 1914. The new magazine was Popular Electricity and Modern Mechanics but it soon changed the title to Modern Mechanics and was World's Advance by April 1915.
The numerous title changes were a topic of discussion in library journals of the time. Libraries would have individual magazines bound into books. A typical size magazine would be bound into volumes every six months, magazine publishers would normally change titles or merge magazines on these volume boundaries. This was not the case with Modern Publishing. The following editorial appeared in the April 1915 Bulletin of Bibliography.
The World's Advance is a new title in magazinedom, and April 1915, is the initial number. Oh, no, not a new magazine, it is vol. 30, number 4; it was Modern Mechanics recently, and back of that — but let it tell its own story of absorptions, marriages, serial-cannibalism or whatever you may call its checkered life hitherto. The World's Advance, formerly Modern Mechanics, with which is combined Popular Electricity and The World's Advance, Modern Electrics and Mechanics, Electrician and Mechanic, is the outgrowth of a number of consolidated magazines. First was Popular Electrician founded in Lynn, Mass., in 1890, taken over later by Electrician and Mechanic, Boston. This absorbed Amateur Work, and Building Craft and in January 1914, was itself merged in Modern Electrics of New York, and called Modern Electrics and Mechanics. Then Popular Electricity and the World's Advance of Chicago was combined with it under the name of Popular Electricity and Modern Mechanics. This name being too long Modern Mechanics was decided upon for the new name, but this being found liable to confusion with a similar periodical, the name World's Advance was adopted." Some pedigree! But it's now a capital magazine for those of a mechanical turn of mind, and is profusely illustrated.
World's Advance had a readership of 135,000 "men" by 1915. A notice in a trade publication for advertisers stated, "72% of its readers are over 21 years old and it is exclusively a man's publication without waste circulation among women and children."
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