Category: Information, Quantitative Display of

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

There have been a number of posts on this blog showing the comparative lengths of rivers and heights of mountain very artistically displayed–beautifully so, sometimes. I found this unusual example in an unexpected place–Rambosson’s Histoire des Astres… (Paris 1874) in its section on the Earth. I’ve never noticed it before, though the caption tells us that its source is from a relatively common-ish atlas by Drioux and Leroy, Atlas Universel de Geographie, which went through many editions. In any  event, I thought I’d share it here, as I can’t seem to locate it in the original:

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post  [Series on the Artistic Display of Data]

This striking  comparative visual display of data appears on the front cover of Scientific American for 2 March, 1907, and relates the weekly consumption of gas in the U.S. in an enormous imaginary storage facility measured against several iconic structures.  (I think it would’ve been interesting to have an inset showing the yearly consumption…)  People would not doubt immediately forget the actual numbers of consumption, though they’d be hard-pressed to forget the comparative imagery of the number. 

“A comparison of the yearly production of gas is unwieldy, owing to the lack- of objects with which to compare.

The Eiffel Tower would look lost compared with a gasometer 4,556 feet -high, so we have taken a week’s supply,
which amounts to 2,163,207,368 cubic feet. This enormous bulk is shown in our engraving stored in a huge gasometer
1,620 feet high and 1,350 feet in diameter. The water is contained in a tank 241 feet high and 268 feet in diameter.
The raw materials are also of a bulky nature. The coal would form a cone 268 feet across at the base and 200 feet high.
The coke also forms a cone 120 feet high and 160 feet across the base. The oil would fill a barrel 155 feet high and
122 feet in diameter.”–Scientific American, 2 March 1907

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post  (Quantitative Display of Information Series)

Here’s another in a long series of Quick Posts on the artistic display of data: this one shows comparative naval strengths just after the turn of the century around the time of the First Moroccan Crisis, and appears in the 5 July 1905 issue of the Scientific American, home to a great number of these examples of popular numerical presentation.  Rule Britannia:

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

This I believe is the eighth installment of a series of posts on articles using infographics comparing objects to buildings and skylines. Ships are often seen this way–comparing the newest/largest to some well-known building in, usually, the NYC skyline. There are variations: for example, nail and salt production are depicted as enormous single objects showing that if you combined all nails made in the U.S. into one 100′ diameter nail, it would be as big as the Singer Building, or some such. The current example is the first I’ve found where the gigantic production item encloses the building against which it is being compared, showing the  size of famous structures relative to all of the glass of a particular sort had they been manufactured and produced as one single unit. This makes for a striking non-sequitur object, and gets the intended point across of how large the various glass manufacturing industries are

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

This is a simple integrative and comparative display of information that has a decided and unexpected twist to it. The graphic is on salt and salt production, and appears in the Scientific American in December 1908, and it is in the top frame that I find the extracurricular attraction. Here we see the representation of what one part of the world–Capitol Hill in Washington D.C.–would look like it if all the oceans in the world were dehydrated:  the globe would be covered by 112 feet of salt. When I think of salt I can come up with the curative and ceremonial uses of it, plus as a wound disinfectant, an exchange unit, being the “salt of the earth”, and so on. But when I see the dome of the Capitol building being smothered by salt it becomes very Old Testament-y to me: Lot’s wife, putting salt in a wound, and of course the big one, salting your defeated enemy’s  lands to ruin their soil and force them to move on.  Anyway, that’s just me–the image puts me in a very J.G. Ballard/Drowned World  frame of mind. The rest of the graphic is pretty good, measuring salt production with an Eiffel-towered-sized barrel; but it is the D.C. image that is the most striking thing about this think-piece. 

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

• This is a slight deviation from the Ships in the Skyline series: the first difference is that the “ship” is an airship; the second is that in the next example there is no “ship” at all, though the enormous sacks of agricultural goods pictured there are measured against the Metropolitan Life Tower, the standard of measurement used in the first example.

This is another segment in the series of measuring newly-constructed monster ships against familiar architectural objects–like the Woolworth Building, Eiffel Tower, the Hoover Dam, and such–to use for a sense of perspective in judging the size of the naval wonders.  In this example, found in Scientific American (June 26, 1909) reckons another sort of ship–an airship–and in this case, it is the Zeppelin ZII being measured against the newly familiar Metropolitan Life Tower, which was just finished that year. (Unfortunately, the Zeppelin met with disaster, crashing jus tweeks prior to the publication of this image.) The Met Life building stood 700′ feet tall and was the world’s tallest from 1909-1913, when it was superseded  by the Woolworth Building. (Interestingly the Met Life was patterned after the companie of St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice (323′) which at about a thousand years old was patterned after the older-still St. Mercuriale.) The Zeppelin was 436′ long, which was an enormous flying machine in 1909, and more than 60% of the length of the laid-down tallest skyscraper.

Here’s a variation on this measured comparison, an image category that I’m pretty sure I’ve not seen before–laying down a tall building:

This is a detail from the front page:

In any event, this is a terrific image. 

And as long as we’re at it, here’s another data visualization from the same year of Scientific American, this one again using the Met Tower to compare the amount of barley, flaxseed, rye, buckwheat, potatoes, wheat, oats, and corn produced in the U.S., the output collected in gargantuan city-crushing burlap sacks and 1700′-tall corn cobs: 

The image was irresistible!

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

There are a number of posts on this blog looking at how data is visualized, some of which use ships and skylines and waterfalls and pyramids to compare their relative sizes. This article (“T-6 The Latest Giant of the Sea” by D.N. Glass in Popular Mechanics, December 1932)  uses illustrative means to display the statistics of the luxury liner Normandie (at the time known as the T-6) one of which employs the comparison of the ship to a skyscraper–actually, the comparison uses two skyscrapers, the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building. 

The cover of this issue uncommonly features a cross section:

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2766

It is difficult sometimes to be appreciative of the smaller things when we are so used to the bigger ones–like in the writing life life, complaining of occasional slow bits in connectivity that will allow you to 

In the old days if it used to be necessary to go to the library, use reference tools, locate the journal, locate the article, put in a request to see the volume, wait for the deliveries,  and then perhaps one of them will actually be what you’re looking for–and this is just the first step after you’ve done the initial reading and research, the digging through footnotes and etc. for what led or inspired people in their thinking had just begun. Then there’s the driving to the library, and finding a spot of park (in my case that was for the LC and parking was no easy matter), and then came the distraction of the greasy spoon on PA Ave and the drive home, all of which could take part or most of the day. That was all fine, because in my case, one of the world’s greatest libraries was a half-hour away–much less depending upon traffic. In the older days, well, if you weren’t in a large city you would not have had access to what you needed, which meant correspondence to acquire the materials and so on, turning the process I experienced in a day into weeks, or longer. IT all gets more complicated the further back you go, and once you get to the point preceding a general postal system, stuff gets hard. Also, someone like I would be out pulling potatoes out of the ground instead of researching who-cares-about-THAT stuff in the library. 

I try to remember that when I complain that my connectivity is slower than it usually is. 

All of this came to mind seeing these paragraphs (literally and figuratively!)  by the one of my favorite figures of the 19th century, the  polymathic W. Stanley Jevons¹ (1835-1882), who wrote on how to use graph paper.  

The creation of graph paper came decades after the creation of the bar graph (William Playfair in 1786), monuments in the history of the visual display of information.  It was a great and very highly useful creation–or creations, I should say, for the idea of the graph and for the paper. Jevons did not invent graph paper, though he may be the first to write about it as a tool.  He give credit to an earlier writer for using graph paper for the first time:  J. Perkins’  “On the Progressive Compression of Water by High Degrees of Force, with Some Trials of Its Effects on Other Fluids” in the Philosophical Transactions for 1826,  (p 544, see below for one of the images from the paper).   

Source: William Stanley Jevons, The Principles of Science, a Treatise on Logic and Scientific Method, 1874,  the chapter “Graphical Methods”.  See:  https://archive.org/details/theprinciplesof00jevoiala/page/492