Category: Information, Quantitative Display of

JF Ptak Science Books LLC   Post #113

I’ve put together a relatively large collection of images from 1850-1940 which are graphic comparisons of data and graphical displays of quantitative information..  In general they display the basic concepts of one idea in terms of something else, or they simply exhibit the idea or concept in cold hard one-to-one images.  The two images below are good interesting, standard representations of these categories.

The first is a very neat and complex display of the food eaten by animals in the London Zoo and was published in the Illustrated London News on May 17, 1913.   The data, found in the report of the Zoological Society of London (for the year 1912) is entitled “The Feeding of the Beasts:  a Year’s Food fore the “Zoo’s” Collection.  The real story though is in the subtitle:  “from shrimps to rats; from onions to oil cakes and mice, the food consumed by the animals at the “zoo” during 1912.    (I’m assuming that the word “zoo” is in quotations as it is a diminutive of “Zoological”, ad was seen as slangish.)  As you can see the language of the undoubtedly stiff report is beautifully brought to life (but not for long) in this work by W.B. Robinson.

   
We see 15,000 pounds of lettuce in a lump and a pile of 4,220 bunches of carrots, along with a serpentine 185 wagons of hay and a snaking 219 wagons of straw; there are giant cubes of biscuits and milk tins, and an even larger cube of 183,000 bananas in boxes; there are orderly armies of goats and rabbits, and a very neat ordering of 19,000 pounds of potatoes in stiff white sacks.  At bottom we see comparatively lonely contingent of 28 ducks (undoubtedly hoping that something else besides what was happening was happening); and of course an antlike column of 7,217 rats. There were also masses of clover, boxes of sparrows, 857 pigeons, 123 pounds of figs, 2 tons of dates, 93 bushels of hemp, 4500 pounds of grapes, 500 pounds of sugar (?), 34,000 eggs, and a slithering line of 25,000 mice.  Most disturbing though is the central figure of a long, quiet column of 318 horses.  I can’t help but feel sorry for them.  It is a remarkable and successful effort to put the data into a form that was somewhat more understandable, if less digestible, and a little more heinous.


The second image is a simple but somewhat bizarre rendering, changing counting units of numerals and replacing them with telephone operators—I can honestly say that I haven’t seen this before.  It is quietly bizarre, but still quite effective in making the sales pitch for the noxious element.

This incredible, indelible image is another from our collection of graphical representations of data and ideas.  This map, is entitled Moral Map of North America, 1854; the Slave States are coloued Red, the blighted influence of Slavery is also deeply felt in those parts more slightly streaked with Red€.  I can find no record of this map, printed obviously by our Bretheren across the ocean–€”that and the fact that it was printed in 1854 is all the publishing data that I can find. 

The poem at bottom reads:
United States! Your banner wears
Two Emblem €”one of Fame;
Alas! The other it bars
Reminds us of your shame.
The white man’s liberty in types
Stands blazoned by your stars;
But what’s the meaning of your stripes;
They mean your Negro-scars.

Reciting this poem by Thomas Campbell before an abolitionist convention in 6 March 1851, William Wells Brown continued (as was reported in the National Anti-Slavery Standard) “The name of the United States is becoming a hissing and bye-word in the mouths of the inhabitants of every clime. My country is indeed the land of oppression. There is not a rood of territory over which the Stars and Stripes€ fly, on which William and Ellen Craft or myself could be protected by law. Wherever the American flag is seen flying on the continent of the New World it points us out as slaves; and we enjoy to-night a degree of freedom in your town that we could not if we were in the land of our birth. I often speak of America as my country, but in point of fact I have no country. In the language of one of the noblest of the Negro’s champions in the United States.  €œMy country is the wide, wide world; My countrymen are all mankind.”€

Brown should know:  his mother was a slave and his father the plantation owner who later granted him his freedom.  Brown then worked the underground railroad and much, much more, working with William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips.  Among his published works included the incredible  Clotel, (1853), which was one of the first novels published by an African-American in the U.S.,  and which discusses in great detail the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and his slave/lover/mistress Sally Hemings.

The map is definitely a tale of morality, showing a definite margin of slavery but also depicting slavery leeching its way through the border states. It is interesting to note that Washington D.C. is represented in red as it was indeed a slave-holding district, with a slave pen right on the Mall in the 1830’s. 

The most striking feature to me of course is the slave who is lashed hand-and-foot to the flagpole on which the American flag is flying—this is the only time that I have seen the slave and the flag portrayed as a unit, together, the slave being tortured by the standard of our country.