Popular Science (1935–1949) is a series of short films, produced by Jerry Fairbanks and released by Paramount Pictures.
[citation needed] The series, filmed in Magnacolor, was the first to profile: father of television Philo T. Farnsworth (1939), Frank Lloyd Wright and his architectural school (1942), building Hoover Dam (1935), building the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge (1936), Academy Award-nominated Moon Rockets (1947), the Electron Microscope (1942), Jet Aircraft (1946), the birth of Plastic Surgery (1937), Telephone Answering Machine (1936), Fuel from Corn Cobs (1949), Rust Heinz and his Phantom Corsair car (1938), world's first full-scale (whole body) X-ray technique (1936), the "Mechanical Brain" Computer at UCLA (1948), Contact Lenses (1936), the Northrop "Flying Wing" (1948).
Produced with the cooperation of the editors of Popular Science magazine, the series introduced its audience to advances in medicine, aviation, science and technology, television, home improvement, planes, trains and automobiles, as well as an assortment of strange and whimsical inventions.
This film series has been a staple on television for decades, most recently shown on the American Movie Classics cable network, hosted by Nick Clooney and Bob Dorian.
The series, as well as the rest of the Jerry Fairbanks film library, is owned by Shields Pictures, which released a DVD in 2008 of some of the original Popular Science sequences.