JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post    Part of the series Graphical Display of Quantitative Data

There is a lot of interesting material in this volume of the Scientific American Supplement for 1912. Initially I looked in it for a fantastic story about geoengineering and the flooding of the Sahara (a post is forthcoming), and in that browse I bumped into the following graphical/representative display of U.S. automotive production (in the article “Growth of the Automobile Industry”):

I’ve featured other such images on this blog–measuring things in terms pyramids, Trinity Churches, gigantic nails, enormous bread, Gargantuan soldiers, that sort–but nothing along the lines of these mammoth cars. The largest of the lot represents the overall auto production in the U.S. for 1911 (which was 300,000) which had they been made into one massive buggy would have been 442′ tall, and an unstated but commensurate length (which I guess would have been on the order of 2500′ long.  The other bits are self-explanatory regarding imports and exports of autos in 1911, the data is there but the interpretation leaves it all a bit wanting.  In any event I really just wanted to capture the Big Car.