American Heritage of Invention & Technology
Invention & Technology Magazine is a quarterly magazine dedicated to the history of technology. It was launched with sponsorship from General Motors in the summer of 1985 as a spinoff of American Heritage magazine. Later, the magazine had a partnership with the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
“Our subject matter is actually nothing less than the making of the world we live in, and the stories of all the extraordinary people who made it,” wrote Frederick Allen, the Founding Editor, in 1985. He noted that the field of the history of technology is relatively new. "Up to now there has been no general magazine of wide circulation reporting on it. A gap exists between the findings of the scholars and the educated public," he wrote.
There were three issues of the magazine a year until 1992, when it became quarterly. Following the Summer 2007 issue, publication was suspended. Publication of the magazine resumed with the Summer 2008 issue, under the slightly changed title American Heritage's Invention & Technology. Publication was suspended after the Winter 2011 issue.
Invention & Technology relaunched in 2020 with grants from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and Charles Koch Institute and donations from 700 subscribers. Its first new issue included profiles of 50 women inventors with articles by Dr. Shirley Ann Jackson, President of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Sylvia Acevedo, CEO of the Girl Scouts, and C. Daniel Mote Jr., former president of the University of Maryland.
Contributors have included such writers about the history of technology as W. Bernard Carlson, Tom D. Crouch, Julie M. Fenster, Robert Friedel, William S. Hammack, Stephen Hawking, T. A. Heppenheimer, Thomas P. Hughes, Sebastian Junger, Arthur Molella, Henry Petroski, Robert C. Post, and Mark Wolverton.