I stumbled across this the other day. If I knew it earlier, I had totally forgotten.
Newspaper mogul E.W. Scripps is generally considered the father of science fairs in the United States.
The origins of the science fairs in the United States began almost
thirty years before the first National Science Fair in Philadelphia in
1950. Its beginnings can be traced back to newspaper mogul E.W. Scripps
in 1921. He fathered the Science Service, now known as Society for Science & the Public, in collaboration with The American Association for the Advancement of Science,
the National Academy of Sciences, and the National Research Council.
Scripps created the Science Service as a nonprofit organization to
popularize science by explaining technical scientific findings in a
jargon-free manner to the American public. Under the watchful editorial
eyes of Edwin Slosson and Watson Davis, the original weekly mimeographed
Science News Bulletin evolved by the end of 1920s into the Scientific
News Letter, a weekly magazine.
