Category: Prints–looking HARD/deeply at

Propaganda and the Dinner Table: Strike-Breaking and Graphical Display of Data, 1911

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 987

This graphic display of the effects of a transport workers’ strike is a pretty,
well-designed piece of propaganda designed to draw in the general, middle-class
(such as it was) and working population into league against the strikers. At least that’s what it looks like to me: the
strangulating effects of food not coming into the port of Liverpool
and its attack on the family dining table. Literally, and figuratively: a
table, by the way, that appears at the direct center of attention, the bull’s-eye
of what is a target, made to look like the transport workers were taking direct
aim at the symbol of the family.

All of what was going on of course was that some hard working people were
trying to get a little more money to put food on their own tables—the facilitators of food distribution
for the nation’s people wanting nothing more than a little more food for
themselves and their families. And these
were the people, by the way, who did not set a five-utensil place settings with
linen table covers and a large fresh bouquet as is oddly the case in the illustration.

By the time this illustration appeared in the Illustrated London News in August 1911 the movement had already
been active for a year—there had also been a call to action the month before
involving over 100,000 workers. The National
Sailors and Firemen’s Union, and the National Union of Ships’ Stewards, Cooks,
Butchers and Bakers, dockhands, lorry rivers, general laborers, and on and on, were involved
in the strike, which was a bitter and confrontational battle between them,
scabs, police, the army, and of course the owners of the means of production
and shipping means.

After the battle of greed and need, need won.

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Bad Ideas — Iconography — Industrial & Technological art — Information, Quantitative Display of — Prints–looking HARD/deeply at
The Hidden Death Hammer: Display of Quantitative Data for the Battle of Jutland, 1915.

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 986

A year and two weeks after the end of WWI, the Illustrated London News published this compelling graphical display comparing
the British naval losses at Jutland to three other great sea battles (Camperdown, the Nile and Trafalgar).
The battle near Jutland (Denmark)
was the largest naval engagement of WWI, involving the German Navy’s High Seas
Fleet and the Royal Navy Grand Fleet, and took place May 31-June 1, 1915 (“The
Day”). It was an absolutely enormous
engagement, with 250 vessels involved (151 for the Royal Navy, 99 for the
German).¹

The end result of the battle was mixed and still debated
today; neither side could convincingly claim a conclusive victory from the
affair.

The Royal Navy losses at Jutland
were staggering: 6,094 killed and 570 wounded, with German losses at 2,551
killed and 507 wounded.

And while this graphical display places Jutland in a weak
context with these other battles, and as pleasing as the thing is visually, the
larger mark, the great lurking statistical and human beast lurking there in the
mix of silhouettes and data, occurs about halfway down the far right column.

Here we see the losses for five ships: the Queen Mary, the Invincible, the
Indefatigable, the Defence, and
the Black Prince. Together, some 5066 men served aboard these
vessels; at the end June 1, 1915, 5,059 of them would be dead. Everyone aboard the Indefatigable, Defence
and Black Prince would be killed; 1
would survive on the Invincible, and
6 would survive the killing of the Queen
Mary. Astonishing, really. And there
are no other numbers like this on this chart.

As certain and as clear as this representation seems, and as
straightforward and seemingly elementary as it looks, I was shocked to see the
numbers for those five Royal Navy ships, a “hidden” history within a broad
comparative analysis.

Notes:

1. England: 28 battleships,
9 battlecruisers,
8 armoured cruisers, 26 light cruisers,
78 destroyers,
1 minelayer,1
seaplane carrier.
Germany:
16 battleships,
5 battlecruisers,
6 pre-dreadnoughts,
11 light cruisers,
61 torpedo
boats.

[The Queen Mary going down.]

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Information, Quantitative Display of — Militaria — Prints–looking HARD/deeply at — Statistics–Fossil, Found, Odd, Forgotten
Image Archaeology–Images within Images Department, 1934

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 978

This
short post comes in the can’t-judge-a-book-by-its-cover category, as the cover
is absolutely the most interesting component of this publication. Unless of course you’re interested in knowing
how many paid subscribers Liberty had in Asheville, North
Carolina in 1934.
Or Salida, Colorado.

That’s all there is to the innards of this pamphlet: circulation numbers
for a prancing, popular magazine. This
would’ve been of great concern to the folks trying to sell and distribute Liberty, showing
potential customers how far and wide the magazine was read. (And evidently it
was very popular: with a circulation per
issue of about 2.2 million, it was the sixth most popularly-read magazine in
the country, following Collier’s, McCall’s,
Ladies Home Journal and The Saturday
Evening Post, all of which had circulations between 2.3 and 2.9 million, so
Liberty was not far off from being
one of the most widely-circulated magazines in the country. It actually rose to
the number two spot for a little while during the war.)

This
is not to say that the magazine itself was a bore, what with writers like P. G.
Wodehouse, Robert Benchley, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert W. Chambers, F.
Scott Fitzgerald, Murray Leinster, Sax
Rohmer and others making contributions here and there.

An
odd bit about Liberty—they “timed” their articles. The reader was told about how long, on average,
it would take to read each piece, taking about three hours to read the entire
issue. That’s something I’ve never seen
before.

So
the contents turned out to be a bit of a bore—the cover, on the other hand, is just
lovely, a beautiful and seamless piece of photo montage with some interesting
semi-hidden images. I quite like the image of the white-shirt-tie magazine stand purveyor that emerges from the shadows (above). And also the face that emerges from underneath the rear brim of the boater on the fellow standing in front of the stand.

This is just a lovely example of what ephemeral play one can draw from an unexpected source.

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Boredom, History of — Perception — Prints–looking HARD/deeply at
Layers of Influence: Dante’s Inferno and Pozzo’s Perspective

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 934

I’ve
written several times in this blog about unusual perspectives in antiquarian
images—namely, views looking straight up and straight down. They really don’t exist, much, in the
post-Daedalus pre-flight days, what with given the difficulty of fabricating non-cartographic
images from the ground.

Next
on what might seem to be a very obvious list of non-obvious interests are images
with layers, levels, sections, plans, projections…sideways columnar views, locating objects
in space and time. But mostly looking at things straight-on, ad then showing
their relational layers. As it turns
out, these sorts of creations aren’t very much seen in the pre-modern
geological era (say, prior to the 1790’s).This is a good example, an astrological man, showing the influence of the planets (and sun and moon) on the different layers of the brain:

Differentiated, say, from Richard Saunders’ Mole-map man, (right) where facial (and etc.) moles were used as maps to determine some sort of specific actions on the organs underneath (and also by a tea-leaf divination, where the mole lines were connected and disconnected, and interpreted, according to the needs/whims of the observer):

The classic sort of image may be something like this fantastic depiction of the Inferno of Dante (shown here in the Comedia published in Venice by Gregorio de Gregoriis in 1515:

The fantastic Jesuit Andrea Pozzo published results of his researches on perspective in his Perspectiva pictorum et architectoru (1693), explaining how he was able to compellingly, unbelievably represent three-dimensional images on two-dimensional spaces, this image showing plan and projection and profile, effectively giving you a three-dimensional cross section of the architectural element:

And again:

And of course his masterpiece displayed, which is an engraving showing the plan of a flat ceiling of St. Ingacio in which he painted his magnificent trompe l’oeil masterpiece:

Also in a way appropriate to this ramble is the explanation diagram by Pozzo’s found in Martin Kemp’s The Science of Art, Optical; Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat, showing the imaginary depth of a deeply illusory painting on a (basically) flat ceiling surface:

Also in consideration for this area is Sir Sandford –the inventor of Standard Time–Fleming’s wonderful idea for a G-o’clock world, a same-time-everywhere planet, with his 1879 diagram illustrating the earth-penetrating time principles so:

(Image source: “Time-reckoning and the selection of a prime
meridian to be common to all nations” in the Proceedings of the Canadian Institute, Toronto, 1879 published by Copp, Clark)

Agricola’s De Re Metallica (from the first Latin edition f 1556) displays many interesting cross sections of Renaissance mines:

There’s much more to come in this area, of course–this is just what I had time to deal with this afternoon, though the this task is much more complicated in the 18th century world than in the 19th, when we find cross sections of the earth and the oceans. But I’ll close here, with all faults.

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JF Ptak

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Architecture and Building — Art History — Perception — Perspective — Prints–looking HARD/deeply at
Flying Wing Aircraft, 1930

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 919

What can I say? I just like the flying wing. Also I should point out that the Illustrated London News is an excellent resource for schematic cut-aways like this–I think that I have 125 or so of them here for the 1910-1945 period.

Junkers built this fabulous flying (“inhabited”) “wing only”
aircraft, sending it up for commercial service in 1929 as the largest airplane
in the world. Only two were built (though a Japanese military knock-off ran to a production quantity of six), and I imagine that it was quite expensive making the Berlin-London flight, cruising in around at 109 mph.

I would like to know what the artist was thinking about when he decided to draw a standing man in the sleeping compartments. Not only that, the fellow is looking straight at the artist…perhaps it is a sly, tiny self-portrait?

Notes

1. Plane specifications:

Crew: Seven (including a full-time engineer who could
service the plane’s four engines from inside the plane).

Capacity: between 30 and 34 passengers, depending upon
variation of the aircraft.

Length: 75 ft

Wingspan:
144 ft

Height: 23 ft

Wing area: 3,122 sq ft

Empty weight: 32,893 lbs

Loaded weight: 52,900 lb

Max takeoff weight: 46,826 lb

Maximum speed: 140 mph

Cruising speed: 109 mp

Range: 2,150 miles

Service ceiling: 12,100 ft

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Aviation & flight — Industrial & Technological art — Prints–looking HARD/deeply at — Technology, History of
What 1.5 Billion Pounds Bought the Military in 1938: Finding a Gem Inside a Great Graphic

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 916

The Illustrated London News for 27 February 1937 hosted a brilliantly designed graphic illustrating the ways in which the British War department could/should spend 1.5 billion pounds (or about $100 billion in 2009 dollars, sort of) over a five-year period as the price of keeping the peace. Of course they wouldn’t make it but a quarter of that distance as Austria fell to Czechoslovakia which fell to Poland and the end. The full-page pictorial effort is to the right:

Nestled in the corner of this page–at about 2×1 inches–is this lovely little graphic, showing that 1.5 bil could purchase 300 Queen Marys, which this delightful little design showed to great effect, and a hidden gem inside of a gem. First is a detail of this detail,

Followed by the full smidgen of the overall page of comparisons and analogies:

Then there’s the semi-standard presentation of what the Navy could purchase:

And then the Army:

And of course the Territorial Army:

And the Air Force (which if you look closely includes a balloon barrage facility at upper right):

By far the most interesting to me is the hidden gemoid of Queen Marys, all produced by the fabulous G.H. Davies, who did many hundreds of such images and sectional cutaways and plans and technical drawings for the ILN over a 25-year period. M.r Davies may well be my favorite technical artist of this period.

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Information, Quantitative Display of — Militaria — Prints–looking HARD/deeply at — Technology, History of
A Mile-High Pile of Wood–Graphical Display of Quantitative Data.

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 913

Continuing
a long, developing thread on the graphical display of quantitative data–and
especially that which uses man-made objects for comparison—is this interesting
bit from a Romanian mining publication from 1933.

The
huge mound next to the Eiffel Tower shows the consumption of wood in Romania over a
ten year period, a stack of wood 700 metres long and 1500 metres high. Evidently this wall has only the most rudimentary depth of a metre, as the legend reads that the volume of the woodpile is 1,050,000 metres cubed, which is the same as its square area. So somebody missed something, here, though the artist did supply some nice shadowing.

Just
above it appeared this comparison for the amount of oil consumed over the same
ten year period

I’m
not sure why this comparison was being made.
This does come in the interwar period which saw a great expansion in
Romanian territory and a vast modernization effort following the country’s devastating
experience in WWI. Maybe it was illustrating modernization from wood-burning power/heating sources to oil-based. I really don’t know–I just liked the Eiffel Tower being dwarfed by a massively tall and impossibly skinny woodpile.

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Industrial & Technological art — Information, Quantitative Display of — Prints–looking HARD/deeply at — Statistics–Fossil, Found, Odd, Forgotten
Unintentional Absurdist Art: Flying Boats with Bucket Feet, 1745

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 901

This
treadmill-powered French pontoon dredge, printed around 1745, looks for all the
world as though it is floating in mid-air, propelling itself along with two
bucket-ended legs, elegantly and impossibly moving its miracle-y-balanced self
forward against all forms of reason and logic, a clunky 18^th century
non-transforming Transformer. The
profile actually and simply shows a dredge at work and just fails to show the water in which it
floats.

The
boat’s dredge is powered by four humans in two treadmills which would move the buckets
back and forth, scraping up the river silt and then emptying it into the shuttle
launch aft. Simple and ingenious—except when
taken out of context, where it begins to look like some advanced Age of Reason floating
boat which, although awkward-looking, is not without its charm.

Source: Charles Singer, History of Tecnology, volume IV,
pg. 634. Singer loftily notes that this machine
“is reminiscent of Goethe’s poem Der Zauberlehring
which inspired Paul Dukas’s well known symphonic poem L’apparenti sorcier” and which would be better known to most folks as
Mickey’s Sorcerer’s Apprentice gig in Fantasia.

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Art — Art History — History of the Future — Industrial & Technological art — Prints–looking HARD/deeply at — Technology, History of
Nazi Propaganda: the British Threat to Germany, pre-War 1939

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 897

I’ve written twenty or so posts here about (mostly) graphical propaganda of World War II, and most of that coming from the Axis (and mainly Nazi) end. A popular theme among this limited exposure seems to be the Germany-surrounded meme: Germany under attack from all sides: massive attacks being directed by the British from air and sea,

airstrikes coming in from thousands of planes in Czechoslovakia, Poland moving on the ground and in the air to invade south-eastern Germany, retaliation mounting from the French, and on and on. And somehow when all of this is presented in cartographical form to the average reader, and when it is presented over and over again, the propaganda must take its toll.

Tonight’s installments come from the Illustriete Zeitung (Leipzig), and were printed just before and just after the start of the general hostilities of WWII (meaning the invasion of Poland, and not the actions against Austria or Czechoslovakia, and not the war in the east beng waged against China by Japan).The first comes in the 27 July 1939 issue–featuring a remembrance of WWI on the cover, showing a devastated field of battle with a spanking-new heavy dagger thrust into the heart of the field–and shows John Bull pulling strings of an advancing/attacking navy in the one hand while the other controls a firing network for cannons facing Germany based in its contiguous-bordered countries. (The image was created by the prodigious Richard Lipus and titled “Englishe Kriegspolitik”.)

The second piece was published just after the start of the war (21 September 1939) and attacks Neville Chamberlain (contrasting words and deeds) and his “treacherous” involvement with neutral countries.

Not particularly virulent, these maptoons undoubtedly helped to form a Nast-ian image in the commonplace psyche of the German people about the treacherousness of the Brits and of their dire situation of being surrounded by potent and threatening enemies.

Some of the other posts on this blog relating to WWII propaganda:

Maps
as Propaganda https://historyofideasblog.com/thesciencebookstore/2008/08/maps-as-propaga.html

Maps
of the Polish “Corridor” https://historyofideasblog.com/thesciencebookstore/2009/09/propaganda-in-maps-the-polish-corridor-1939.html

Maps
of Naval Disaster https://historyofideasblog.com/thesciencebookstore/2009/05/jf-ptak-science-books-llc-post-624-the-admiralty-regrets-to-announce–was-for-years-the-standard-beginning-to-an-offici.html

Anti-Nazi
Propaganda https://historyofideasblog.com/thesciencebookstore/2009/08/antinazi-propaganda.html

Nazi
Propaganda and the Threat From Czechoslovakia
https://historyofideasblog.com/thesciencebookstore/2008/08/propaganda-maps.html

Humanitarian
propaganda for Allied families with family members who were POWs https://historyofideasblog.com/thesciencebookstore/2008/09/humanitarian-pr.html

Nazi
Germany and Scaring the Will to War (Germany surrounded, again) https://historyofideasblog.com/thesciencebookstore/2008/10/nazi-propaganda.html

Nazi-directed
scare tactics published in English https://historyofideasblog.com/thesciencebookstore/2008/08/nazi-propagan-1.html

The
Luftwaffe and RAF present their (graphical) popular cases https://historyofideasblog.com/thesciencebookstore/2008/09/graphical-and-a.html

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Maps, Cartography, History of Mapmaking — Militaria — Perception — Prints–looking HARD/deeply at
Examination Photos, 1895-1943

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 891

I suddenly found myself with a short virtual stack of interesting early-century photos featuring examinations of one sort or another. There’s nothing here for exams at school (which makes me think about when the first graded school test was invented), but there are some other interesting images of exams.

For example, there’s this odd picture of two guys inspecting the installation of a voting booth in Chicago in 1905. There’s nothing wrong with this, no sir, not since we’re in Chicago, which never has had any sort of voting irregularity–perhaps that’s why I get such a creepy feeling from this image.

This picture has everything going for it in a fabulous way, from the poses of the tester and the examiner (who is standing in a Hitchcockian manner, a thin man in a fat man pose) to the row of cups, to the size of the spittoon, to the slightly dirty and occasionally chipped cups, to the title of the whole thing. Mincing Lane. I understand and commend the need for quality control, but the picture does have its odd elements. (I’d like to know the name of the interpids pictured here; or, rather, their nicknames.)

Evidently the men aboard the USS Brooklyn had little to do during unspecified doldrums than to watch and critique the ship’s barber.

Then there are the professional barber-and-haircut-watchers, shown here at a barbering school examination in 1903: five crowded chairs and a few men in hats.

The big, white, filled-but-lonely room at Ellis Island, where you either got in, got quarantined, or got sent back home.

I’m not sure what this nurse is doing.

This nurse is administering an exam to a newcomer at one of the American Japanese internment/prison camps sometime around 1943.

There are undoubtedly many more of course, but that’s the lot available on the desktop right now.

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Perception — Perspective — Prints–looking HARD/deeply at