Category: History

Treasure trove

GEMS FROM MICHAEL STOLL’S INFORMATION DESIGN COLLECTION.

I’ve posted a number of times about Michael Stoll’s outstanding, and ever-growing, information design collection.
(Several links are at the foot of this page.)
These examples are from two twentieth-century books that were included in a presentation that Michael gave recently to one of my classes. The joy of making infographics comes shining through.

Above and below, NATURE CROSS-SECTIONS by Richard Orr, 1995.

Michael Stoll: “The visual blocks act like paragraphs of text. The information is divided up and easy to explore in this block-by-block format, but is still connected through style and content.”

MAN’S REACH INTO SPACE by Roy A. Gallant. Illustrated by Lee J. Ames, 1959.

Michael Stoll: ”The vivid colors and color contrasts, plus the extreme perspective views and clear layout, support understanding of these complex topics. I’m sure that the American people’s high level of knowledge about all things related to the Space Race contributed to the pure excitement back then.”

PREVIOUS POSTS ABOUT ITEMS IN MICHAEL’S COLLECTION (Yes, it includes a 1965 Cadillac.)

Cadillac: https://wp.me/s7LiLW-cadillac

Pictogram story: https://wp.me/p7LiLW-2Na

Swiss data viz: https://wp.me/p7LiLW-2iq

Wall charts: https://wp.me/p7LiLW-1Sj

Eye model: http://wp.me/p7LiLW-1yx

Flap books: http://wp.me/p7LiLW-IV

Flight thru Instruments: http://wp.me/p7LiLW-Rr

Herbert Bayer’s Geo-Graphic Atlas: http://wp.me/p7LiLW-xO

The Atlas to Alexander von Humboldt’s “Kosmos,” : http://wp.me/p7LiLW-jO

Art Deco NYC

MODERNIST ARCHITECTURAL MASTERPIECES.

I lived in New York City for many years, which does not make me an authority on the city’s numerous examples of Art Deco architecture, but… here’s a few of my favorites. Above, the incomparable Chrysler Building (which opened in 1930).

All black and white photographs are by Samuel Gottscho, from the Gottscho-Schleisner Collection at the Library of Congress.

Lobby of the Empire State Building (1930).

Photograph © Andreahast/123rf

30 Rockefeller Plaza (1933).

Lobby of the Daily News Building (1930). A previous post about its magnificent globe: https://wp.me/p7LiLW-17y

Photograph by Michael Stoll

Crown of the General Electric Building (1931).

Photograph by Chris06

Auditorium of Radio City Music Hall (1932). There’s almost 6,000 seats.

Photograph by flickr4jazz

Gone, but not forgotten
The Trylon and Perisphere, centerpiece of the 1939 New York World’s Fair. A previous post about them: https://wp.me/p7LiLW-2fK

A streamlined locomotive at the Fair.

Art Deco (short for Arts Decoratifs) takes its name from the Exposition International des Arts Décoratifs et Industrials Modernes (International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts) held in Paris in 1925. Although elements of Art Deco had been around for decades before that. The style had a huge influence on all forms of design through the 1920s and ’30s. Geometric ornament, streamlined forms and straight lines were some of the components of the Art Deco style.

Planetary motion

GEARED MODELS OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM.

An orrery represents the relative positions and motions of the planets. It’s named after the Earl of Orrery, who commissioned one of the earliest mechanical planetary models in 1713. The example shown here is turned with a hand crank that, through a complicated set of gears, moves the planets and moons. It was designed by William Pearson in 1813, and constructed sometime in the following nine years by Robert Fidler.
Photograph: Science Museum Group Collection ©The Board of Trustees of the Science Museum

The model is obviously not to scale. The Earth would be tiny, and a huge distance from the Sun. This earlier post was about the scale of the Solar System: https://wp.me/p7LiLW-A8

Below, an image from Smith’s Illustrated Astronomy (1850) with an orrery in front of a diagram of the planets and their orbits.

This 1776 painting by Joseph Wright of Derby shows a lecturer discussing an orrery. There’s a lamp in place of the Sun.

A tellurion (or tellurium, or tellurian) shows the Sun and the Earth. This one was made in 1776.

Photograph: Sage Ross

Build your own tellurium. A wooden kit: https://bit.ly/3dLiuhN

It’s hell out there
The planets look benign in planetary models, but in reality they’re hostile environments, to put it mildly. For example, Venus (shown below) has a toasty average temperature of 870°F (466°C), and Neptune is somewhat cold at -350°F (-212°C), plus it has brisk winds in excess of 1,200 mph (1,931 kph).

NASA/JPL-Caltech

Airways

THE EVOLUTION OF THE AIRLINE ROUTE MAP.

They’re mostly found near the back of in-flight magazines, along with profiles of jets and lots of aircraft manufacturer metrics that probably only appeal to about one person per flight, maximum. (Yes, I’m that person. I want to know the wingspan of an Airbus 320.) You can find some network information in these spider-web extravaganzas, but it’s quite hard work, especially in areas where there’s lots of flights. The one above shows Delta’s US network.

Of course, this type of map grew in route complexity as commercial air travel expanded. Early maps were pictorial and rather engaging. These historical examples, with easily defined routes, are all from the 1940s. Jet-powered airliners didn’t come into service until the 1950s, with the consequent dramatic expansion of flight networks.
Below, American Airlines, 1945. Click on the image for a larger version.

A detail. “Oh look, there’s a steam shovel down there, just like on the map!”

Delta Air Lines, 1946.

Air France, 1948.

BOAC, 1949.

The historical images above can be  downloaded in high resolution from the David Rumsey Map Collection. https://www.davidrumsey.com

Talking of BOAC (British Overseas Airways Corporation), I saw this 747 decked out in retro (and excellent) livery at Heathrow Airport last summer. It was painted to celebrate British Airway’s 100-year anniversary.

BA’s current look.

Photographs © British Airways.

The maps gradually outgrew their format as air travel expanded. With no possibility to isolate and examine a single route, they’re of marginal effectiveness in print. Obviously the lines are not flightpaths. So an airline route map is more a diagram than a map, with the lines arcing farther in an attempt to avoid all the other lines.

Pure flight
Airline routes drawn from data, by John O’Sullivan.

By Aaron Koblin. See an animated version, with a flight count, here: https://bit.ly/31QuBWf

Interactivity
Opens up a lot of possibilities in terms of exploring route data. Here’s one example.  https://www.flightconnections.com/

And finally… interactive airport flightpaths from Infographics Group. Explore it here: https://flight-patterns.igg.solutions/

Zoologist

THE SCIENTIFIC ART OF ERNST HAECKEL.

“Kunstformen del Natur” (Art Forms of Nature) is Haeckel’s masterwork. Published in 1904, it contains 100 illustrations of animals and sea-life in two volumes. The illustrations were originally published in ten sets over the previous six years.
Here are some examples of the plates. Above, bivalve shells. Below, sea squirts.

Moths.

Lizards.

Sea snail shells.

Ringed worms.

Slime molds.

Hummingbirds.

Tree of Life
Haeckel was strongly influenced by Charles Darwin’s seminal book: “On the Origin of the Species.”
This diagram is from “Anthropogenie oder Entwickelungsgeschichte des Menschen” (Anthropogeny or the Evolution of Man), 1874.

My previous post featured Taschen’s “History of Information Graphics”:
https://wp.me/p7LiLW-33l
There’s a page in the book about Haeckel’s “Radiolaria.” (Protozoa with a diameter of 0.1 to 0.2 mm. They have mineral skeletons.)
Below is one of the plates.

History lessons

TWELVE CENTURIES OF INFOGRAPHICS.

This impressive guide to historical graphics, curated by Sandra Rendgen and edited by Julius Wiedemann, was published last month. It’s big and heavy, in the Taschen tradition, and packed with around four hundred examples that track the development of information graphics from the Early Middle Ages to the end of the twentieth century. The historical progression is punctuated by separate sections that feature the collections of David Rumsey, Michael Friendly, Michael Stoll and Scott Klein. This is essential reading for people in our field.
Here are some sample spreads. Click on the images for larger versions.

Below, Beatus of Liébana, ca.1180.

Hartmann Schedel and Michael Wolgemut, 1493.

Charles-Joseph Minard, 1869. (From Michael Friendly’s collection.)

Emma Willard, 1846.

Left, Carl Weigand, ca. 1963. Right, Hermann Bollmann, 1964.

Massimo Vignelli and Bob Noorda, 1972.

Taschen’s website: https://bit.ly/2Z7pdiD

Transparency
I have a graphic in the twentieth-century section, but I’ve tried my best to be objective about the book. If you get a copy, you’ll see what I mean about there being a lot to learn from these pages.

35,000 years ago
The first post on this blog (in August 2016) was a very short history of infographics: https://wp.me/p7LiLW-9C

History revisited

GOING BACK IN TIME.

There’s a lot to learn from our rich information design heritage. Below, links to ten historically-themed posts.

Bayer’s masterpiece https://wp.me/p7LiLW-xO

Mid-century data viz https://wp.me/p7LiLW-2AI

Humanscale https://wp.me/p7LiLW-1y5

Flight thru Instruments https://wp.me/p7LiLW-Rr

Flap books https://wp.me/p7LiLW-IV

Leonardo who? https://wp.me/p7LiLW-1WJ

Microscopic https://wp.me/p7LiLW-1W5

Wall charts https://wp.me/p7LiLW-1Sj

Swiss data viz https://wp.me/p7LiLW-2iq

Space Age https://wp.me/p7LiLW-2RW

Last week’s post: Maps revisited
https://wp.me/p7LiLW-2Ze

Next week’s post: Tools

Space Age

DESIGN GOES COSMIC.

Photograph © Larry Masseth/123rf

Starting in the late 1950s and carrying on for decades, space exploration was a big influence on design. This followed on from, and overlapped, the Atomic Age, which had a similar kind of golden-future impact. Above, Seattle’s Space Needle, built in 1962 for the 21st Century Exposition, which is also known as the Seattle World’s Fair. ( A post about the Atomic Age: https://wp.me/s7LiLW-atomic )

The 1964/65 New York World’s Fair sits firmly during the heyday of the style. This is an opportunity to once again show the fantastic Unisphere. It’s still there. Go and see it if you can. (Mega-globes post: https://wp.me/p7LiLW-3D)

Photograph by Anthony Conti

“The Jetsons” captured the Space Age popular aesthetic. The original series ran from September 1962 to March 1963.

The KenAnn Building in Fort Lauderdale was built in 1964. Online sources say that it was inspired by “The Jetsons.”

Image: Google Street View

NASA logo (1959).

The iconic Las Vegas sign (1959).

Photograph by Thomas Wolfe

Capitol Records Building, Los Angeles (1956). The light on the top of the spire blinks “Hollywood” in morse code.

Photograph by Rui Santos

1962 AMI Continental 2 jukebox.

Ball Chair by Eero Aarnio (1963). https://bit.ly/2M5MubE

Disney’s Tomorrowland opened in 1955. At the entrance was the World Clock.

And Disney’s 2015 film of the same name was, naturally, an ode to the Space Age.

The architectural style know as “Googie” captures the futuristic atomic/space theme, and for a few decades was widely used in the United States for coffee shops, motels and gas stations. This aesthetic later became a component of the Mid-century modern style that is so popular today. The term came from a Los Angeles coffee shop called “Googies.”

The Union 76 gas station in Beverly Hills (1965) is considered to be one of the best examples of Googie architecture.

The Cinerama Dome in Hollywood opened in 1963, using a geodesic dome design developed by Buckminster Fuller.

Image: Google Street View

Mid-century modern: Lounge Chair by Charles and Ray Eames. https://bit.ly/2LujbQ3

Robert McCall’s visions of the future took the Space Age style through to the 21st century.

Two hundred

THIS BLOG, SO FAR.

This is my 200th post, so I’m in a reflective mood. For nearly two years, I have held forth, but it’s only one viewpoint.
That’s all. And no more important than anyone else’s.
Typeface by Sawdust: http://www.madebysawdust.co.uk

As this is a milestone of such super-high importance to mankind, it’s time to examine the WordPress data. (As of July 22.)

TOTAL VIEWS: 62,340

TOP TEN BY VIEWS
I’ve left out these two from the list.
Home page: 18,598 (Obviously, this could be divided up amongst all the posts.)
About me: 1,596 (For anyone remotely interested.)

1. Tools of the trade: 3,443  https://wp.me/p7LiLW-EI

2. Size comparison: 2,213  https://wp.me/p7LiLW-181

3. Notebooks: 1,519  https://wp.me/p7LiLW-2i0

4. Sketching infographics: 823  https://wp.me/p7LiLW-14Q

5. The incredible Bollmann map workshop (Part 1): 682  https://wp.me/p7LiLW-Ak

6. Nigel Holmes on humor: 678  https://wp.me/p7LiLW-iZ

7. Archeological pictograms: 626  https://wp.me/p7LiLW-V0

8. Cutaway magic: 611 https://wp.me/p7LiLW-qF

9. Infographics made easy: 601  https://wp.me/p7LiLW-Ic

10. When infographic dinosaurs roamed the Earth: 580  https://wp.me/p7LiLW-h0

VIEWS: TOP FIVE COUNTRIES

USA: 21,292

UK: 4,718

Germany: 4,716

 Russia: 2,973

Spain: 2,631

GOING FORWARD
I’ve posted twice a week up to now, but I’ll only be posting occasionally in the future. Why? Here’s one reason: I took a look at my ideas page last week. I think it says it all.

Seriously, thank you all for following over the last two years. And for sending ideas and encouraging emails. I really appreciate it.