The degradation goes back much further than the 1970s, I’m afraid. I’ve got Scientific American volumes from the 1860s and they were incredible back then. Lett

The degradation goes back much further than the 1970s, I’m afraid. I’ve got Scientific American volumes from the 1860s and they were incredible back then. Letters that formed conversations discussing wild theories about comets that lasted for months, sometimes years. Some guy wrote in about his discovery of heat treating asphalt to make it more reliable. Another wrote in about how machine guns were useless in his experience in the Civil War and how the Europeans were about to repeat the same mistake in whatever war was just starting. Lots of ads for with saw blade drawings for Emerson's patent movable teeth made by the American Saw Company. The prints were gorgeous [1] and the ads, despite covering a significant portion of each issue, were mostly text. Fascinating from a historical perspective but easy to ignore when reading for the rest of the material. [1] https://imgur.com/a/vF00pdX https://imgur.com/a/vF00pdX