JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
This is another in a series of quick posts on images from my WWI photo collection. Photographs were made by pools of photographers working for several different photographic news agencies, with the content of the images generally secured and approved by the Committee for Public Information (CPI), which came into existence by executive order under President Woodrow Wilson on April 13, 1917, and which was charged with the task of wining the hearts and minds of the people of the U.S. to gain public support for the war and for American participation. The way that many newspapers obtained the war images that they published in their papers was via a semi-centralized pool of war images. The newspaper would request, say, a photo of German prisoners, and would contact one of these photographic agencies—for example, say, the Central News Photo Service of 26-28 Beaver Street, NYC—and purchase the rights for republication, and then print it in the newspaper along with the story. In almost every case the photo would be accompanied by a caption mimeographed onto an attached piece of cheap paper, or have the information stamped on the reverse.
In this photo I'm struck by the depth and breadth of the shells, and that they would represent a not very long salvo by a battery of 25 cannon. I don't know artillery, though it seems to me that these look like they are in the 200-300mm range. My guess is that we're looking at 1500 or thereabouts rounds, which distributed to just 25 cannon would be 60 each which means that these shells could be used up in an hour or two of firing.
I'm guessing that something like 1 billion artillery shells were fired during WWI (this would be on the low end of estimates, I think) which means that what you're seeing here is .0000015% of the total. For comparison .0000015% of the population of the U.S. would be 525 people.
The other noticeable thing is that of this group of soldiers (I reckon there's a hundred or so who are directly lined up against the shells) there are only 5 or 6 who are touching the shells.
Estimating that the standing shells occupied 500,000,000 sq ft on base they would fill the floor space of 344 Pentagon Buildings.
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