Category: Information, Quantitative Display of

How High is Blue? (1851)

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What struck me in this technical illustration is the cross-section of the ocean of air, and the attempt to depict the characteristics of the atmosphere in receding qualities of blueness. This seems a natural thing to attempt, but I can’t really remember seeing anything quite like this from the mid-19th century–sure there there are images showing the height of the atmosphere, but I just can’t recall the point being made in shades of blue. The image itself is a large detail from “Illustrations of Natural Philosophy, Pneumatics”, a colored lithograph by John Philipps Emslie, and made in 1851. This copy is from the Wellcome Collection, London, and try as I might I have not yet been able to find out in what book (if any) in which this work was published. Emslie was very active, and composed a number of complicated technical and data visualization efforts like this one, but I can’t yet find publication details. In the meantime, I’m posting this, concentrating on the atmosphere.

So far as the heights go in this image, we get through the troposphere and stratosphere, and most of the way through the mesosphere, and so far as the oxygen content goes at the various altitudes, the faded blueness for the relative ease of breathing air is fairly not-so-correct, but that’s not what the intention of the graphic was supposed to show…I was just trying to match-up the blueness with something besides height. The practical experience of humans in 1851 was extremely limited, the record ascension in a balloon at this point still stood at about 27,000′ and was made in 1837–the next big step would be in 1862 when the record was set at 39,000′, which was about 10,000′ higher than any mountain on Earth, the flight subjecting the aeronauts to the thrills of extremely low air pressure and cold. Anyway, the print does get its point across.

Source: the Wellcome Collection, https://wellcomecollection.org/works?query=John+Philipps+emslie#zpyyeaut

The full image:

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Information, Quantitative Display of
Display of Information: the Naval Power of Principal Nations (1903)

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I came upon this fine display of info this evening, a big two-page spread in the Illustrated London News, opening up to an impressive 16×26″ or so. The chart shows relative naval power (measured in this case in terms of battleships) between Great Britain, France, Russia, the U.S., Italy, Japan, and Austria. It appeared in Scientific American Supplement issue 1411, January 17, 1903 (pp 22608-9). The images are greatly expandable:

And in parts:

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Information, Quantitative Display of — Technology, History of — World War I
A Beautiful Calendar Calculator (1562)

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Giorlamo Cataneo provided us with this gorgeous circular calendar calculator in his Rote Perpetue…, published by Francesco Marchetti in Brescia in 1562. This is the third-from-last of 58 such tables that illustrate this elusive work. Cataneo (1540-1586) was an Italian engineer and architect who published at least eight works, many of them quite beautiful, including the fortifications book Dell’arte del misurare libri due, nel primo de’quali s’insegna à misurare, & partir’ i campi, which is a particularly lovely thing.

Illustration from:

Rote perpetue, per le quali si puo con qual numero di due dadi si voglia : overo con due dadi secondo l’horologio d’Italia : ritrouar quando si fà la Luna : le Feste mobili : la Patta : l’Aureo numero : l’Indittione, la Lettera domenicale col bisesto et in che giorno entra il principio d’ogni mese di. m. Girolamo Cataneo.

Another source for the full book, Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_1ky_MGsNW3AC

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Information, Quantitative Display of — Memory, Historry of
A Fine Display of Pie Charts 1893

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“This apparatus works unerringly as the mills of the gods, but beats them hollow as to speed”–Electrical Engineer, November 11, 1891

Many splendid displays of newly-manipulable data made their appearance in the Henry Gannet atlas to accompany the great U.S. census of 1890 –this example displays the composition of foreign born inhabitants of each of the states. Part of this was due to the use of the Herman Hollerith tabulators, which made their appearance for the census office to work their electromechanical magic to process data faster than the 8-year-long process of the 1880 census. As it stands, the Gannet atlas and the census report was published beginning just two years after the completion of the 1890 census, a job made possible by the “mills of the gods” machine and some 48,000 enumerators (who completed returns for 13,000,000 households). With prodigious thanks to Hollerith, the census was completed quickly and with a wider variety of data collection rather than what would have been the opposite without them.

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Computer Tech/History — Information, Quantitative Display of — Inventions — Technology, History of
The Great Passaic Textile Strike of 1926–H.L. Mencken’s copy

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This broadside was an appeal to like-minded people to contribute to a fund to help relieve thew dire conditions of textile worker strikers in Passaic, New Jersey, in 1926. There were more than 16,000 people involved in this sometimes-brutal strike, people who were trying to stay even in their lives, looking for a little more money and a little better working conditions than what they had. The Passiac (a working city just south of Patterson in an industrial triangle section of the state) strikers were moving against a number of textile (wool and silk) mills there, trying to force management to pay them something closer to the $1400 annual income for a family of four to survive. \

Most workers there were making $1,000-$1,200 a year ($800-$1,000 if the worker was a woman, and about half of them were) for 50+ hours of labor per week. The result was that the workers could not afford good housing and food, and those disadvantages paid off in high rates of tuberculosis, very high incidence of child mortality, and a low average life expectancy. The strike began slowly in January 1926, with the mills responding with vicious attacks by paid thugs and by police.

[Measures 8.5×14″]

There’s quite a bit written on this strike, and most seem to say that it was an important event in the history of “labor relations”, and that it was the first time that a Communist-led strike succeeded in the United States, (There is a complex legacy as to who the leadership was for this strike, but the end result is that, at the end, the Communists were in charge.)

But what I wanted to say here about this broadside was the communal effort involved with keeping the strikers (and the strike) going. The strikers needed money to live, as there was certainly no money coming in, and since there was obviously no union, there was no general fund from which any of these families could draw food money from). they needed money just to buy food and pay for housing. SO the call for “Give all you can!” and “Give right away!” were as desperate as they sounded. My guess is that there would be a representative of the International Workers Aid society national office going from factory to factory, or door-to-door, soliciting for money for the Passaic workers’ relief. The strike was no doubt a very nasty business, with a victory only a victory once there was more food on the table, less illness, and far fewer babies dying from preventable causes. Probably this looked like a victory to others so far as the future of fair labor/pay was concerned, but not so much for the strikers who brought this about.

It is also interesting to note that this copy was given at some point to H.L. Mencken, who gave it right away to the Library of Congress, where it wound up in a forgotten “Pamphlet Collection”, and then sold to me (years afterwards).

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Industrial & Technological art — Information, Quantitative Display of — Social History
“An Appalling Attempt to Muzzle the Watch-Dog of Science” (1883)

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“An appalling attempt to muzzle the watch-dog of science”, by Friedrich Graetz (ca. 1840-1913), was published in the 14 March 1883 ( v. 13, no. 314) issue of Puck magazine. The caption reads: “The Society for the Suppression of Blasphemous Literature proposes to get up cases against Professors Huxley and Tyndall, Herbert Spencer, and others who, by their writings have sown widespread unbelief, and in some cases rank atheism”. Thomas Henry Huxley (“Darwin’s Bulldog”), John Tyndall, and Herbert Spencer were all champions of Darwin and eovlution, and evidently were found to be dangerous by the entirely real society—I thought that the name might have been a euphemism, but it evidently existed (according to English Modernism, National Identity and the Germans, 1890–1950 by Dr Petra Rau).

From the Library of Congress description http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2012645455/:

“Illustration shows Herbert Spencer as a statue of a large dog at the entrance to a public building emitting rays of light labeled “Science”; many diminutive men, wearing oversized top hats, scamper about with ladders and muzzles in an attempt to silence Spencer’s views on religion and science. On a nearby flagpole hangs a banner that states “Freedom of Thought”.”

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Think or be Damned–1899

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This work—“The Last Stand, Science versus Superstition”, a chromolithograph by Udo J. Keppler (close!)–appears in Puck in the issue of July 19, 1899. It is a very strong statement and also one that I’ve never seen it before (my thanks to Thony Christie of Renaissance Mathematicus and Whewell’s Ghost for surfacing it), and appears to me on the day of the global marches in support of scientific thought against tyrannies of illogical and sodden belief.

[Image: Library of Congress, http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2012647443/]

I guess the greatest aspect of this print is the flag “Think or be Damned” that flutters in the background of The Fact Men as they prepare to defend themselves against the “Believe or be Damned” crowd, “Medieval Dogmatism”, just advancing. It is a voracious print, and leaves nothing to spare in the choice of science and facts and inquiry against not-so. Interestingly, the men fighting this battle aren’t scientists, but theologians.

The “Think” group is identified by the LC as (Richard Heber) Newton (1840-1914, an Episcopal theologian and forward thinker; (Lyman) Abbott (1835-1922, American Congregationalist theologian); (Charles A.) Briggs (1841-1913, Presbyterian scholar and theologian); (Minot J. ) Savage (1841-1918, Unitarian), and (Felix) Adler (1851-1933, professor of political and social ethics, rationalist). They are surrounded by cartridge boxes for their Gatling gun labeled “Scientific Facts”, “Historical Facts”, and “Rational religion”, theologians prepared for the fight of rationalism against obedient belief.

It wasn’t the “Last Stand”, as I think there is always a stand to be made, especially in times like these where preposterous and Bie Lie-sized ideas are formed at the extreme head of state. Who would have thought it possible that a stand must be made against “alternative facts”, climate change denial, manipulation of the scientific record, “FAKE ______”, and so on? Images like this from Puck from 118 years ago show that there is a history of “last stands” of coherent and inquisitive thought against feeble sloppiness of such sugary mindless dogmatisms, and that there will be a future to them, as well.

________

The image above appears in a fine post by Peter Harrison on the conflict between science and religion here: https://sciencereligionspectrum.org/blog-posts/science-and-religion-conflict-for-non-religious-britons-and-canadians/ I just wanted to add some information on the print itself.

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A Beautiful Regression, and then Some (1877)

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This beautiful bit of data visualization was a significant development in the history of statistics and was employed in pioneer Sir Francis Galton’s “Typical Laws of Heredity, III”, which appeared in Nature magazine on April 19, 1877.

[Image: Francis Galton, “Typical Laws of Heredity, III”, Nature. p 513, April 19, 1877]

Tis follows on the heals of the first paper in this series, earlier in the month of April, 1877:

This contribution by Galton is the “first major step in the development of correlation and regression analysis” according to Judy Klein’s Statistical Visions in Time: A History of Time Series Analysis, 1662-1933, (page 131). She continues:

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Information, Quantitative Display of — mathematics, logic
Graphs of Defects of American Soldiers, 1919
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Right at the end of WWI there appeared a famous publication on the end results of an epic study on the physical conduction of U.S. men drafted into the armed services:

War Department: Defects Found in Drafted Men; Statistical Information Compiled from the Draft Records…the Physical Condition of the Men registered and Examined in Pursuance of the Requirements of the Selective Service Act, Prepared under the direction of the Surgeon General M.W. Ireland, Major General, MC U.S. Army, by Albert G. Love, MD…and Charles B. Davenport...

This huge (358pp) report was printed by the Government Printing Office in 1920 and provided more data of enlisted men than had ever exited, and for good or for ill (and for the various problems encountered in data collection and interpretation), there was a tremendous stew of bubbling bits of human failure and detractions, real and not.

Full text via National Library of Medicine: https://collections.nlm.nih.gov/bookviewer?PID=nlm:nlmuid-9502639-bk NIH Digital Collections
- “This 1920 study of the men called by the selective service for the U.S. Army upon America’s entry into the Great War was ordered by the War Department, and it employed as its eugenics specialist, Charles Davenport. The study looked at many types of physical, psychological, and mental factors within this part of the male population of the United States.”
- “The conclusion of the analysis was than an inordinately high proportion of U.S. Army draftees were defective and below average in physical fitness and psychological or mental readiness. Davenport and his colleagues also concluded that much of the American male population was not equipped for participatory democracy. This test of U.S. soldiers was thoroughly challenged at the time due to suspect analytical methods.”–University of Missouri Library https://library.missouri.edu/exhibits/eugenics/defects.htm
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Information, Quantitative Display of — World War I
A Map of Lakes and Islands, 1856

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Representing a collection of things on the same sheet of paper and doing so with everything being in the same scale seems to have been an invention of the 19th century–more specifically, this innovation may have been that of the architect Etienne Durand in the 1840’s. Durand would place the plans of various buildings in a collective all in the same scale–which was a great thing because then the student or the viewer would be able to compare these images with a common denominator. (I guess that a person could make a case for J.J. Audubon that appeared in his iconic work, published just a few years earlier than Durand in 1837/8, as all of his birds were on the same scale because all of the 1,068 birds he included in his work were drawn life sized.)

In any event this thought came to mind with the mostly-19thc practice of showing the lengths of rivers and the heights of mountains to scale in atlases, though especially with the representation of lakes and islands (and waterfalls!) which to my experience are much more uncommon sightings. All of this leads me to this fine work (below), which surfaced again this morning–a representation of lakes and islands on the same scale, and printed in 1856. I don’t know at this point how much earlier these things get for lakes/islands, but it seems that they wouldn’t be very much earlier than this.

SO, 1856¹ may have been tone of the earliest times that these 150+ lakes and islands of the Western and Eastern Hemisphere were ever been printed on the same page and in the same scale exclusive of their associative land masses and placed contiguously, side-by-side. They were, of course, seen in a common perspective before on any world map, but I think that this is the first year in which the islands and lakes of the world were displayed without oceans and land masses, and the effect is a little odd. If you take away the color and the text the image takes on a very definite biological flavor (I keep thinking of that tiny bone in the ear for the small lakes…) In any event it is far easier to compare these features without the distractions of the non-lakes and non-islands clouding and confusing our perspective fields.

This was also the beginning of the heyday of publishing comparative this-and-that in atlases: from 1840-1880 or so was the period in which the majority of descriptive comparatives were published. This is when you would see comparatives of the lengths of rivers and the heights of mountains and waterfalls beautifully displayed in atlases. I don’t know what happened after then, but the publication of this sort of data really fell off, with the heights of mountains/lengths of rivers stuff relegated to filling the empty areas in double-hemisphere world maps.

Here’s a relatively early image of this type called “A View of the Comparative Lengths of the Principal Rivers and Heights of the Principal Mountains in the World”, published by Orr & Smith in London (1836), featuring 44 rivers and a hundred or so mountains. It is a lovely and graphically pleasing work, and an early effort in displaying the dissected river and mountains in such a forensic-like way.

This I think is my favorite genre of specialty map, and, for now, I’d just like to surface this map by George Colton, and admire it, and try to imagine the kind of impact it must’ve had on people back there in 1856 who were seeing this sort of data displayed so for the first tine. It would have been a huge revelation to see the lakes and islands compared side-by-side; it was a fresh, new idea, and an insight in how to look at things in general.

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Information, Quantitative Display of — Maps, Cartography, History of Mapmaking

Category: Information, Quantitative Display of

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