Historic Data Viz #6: From Dinosaurs to WWI Technology
Plus, a truly bonkers story of esoteric systems in this recap of the last couple of months in historical-viz (Sept-Nov 2019)
Here it is! The latest installment in a series uncovering some of the great charts, maps, and information design from before 1990 as unearthed by the Data Visualization Society’s historical-viz channel. This is an especially interesting collection, so let’s get to it!
I challenge you to find a more visually exciting organizational chart! Crafted by Antonio Petrucelli for Fortune Magazine, this is an illustration of the advisory committees for the US WWII army as it shifted its focus toward the war in the Pacific. A veteran of Fortune’s art department, Petrucelli takes a banal org chart and transforms it into a sculptural illustration that’s part molecular diagram and part fairground toy. One can almost see it jiggle and move. It’s set in an abstract landscape complete with a mountain on the distant horizon, clouds and an RFC sun radiating money.
The Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) was a government corporation administered by the US Government that provided financial support to state and local governments. Its initial purpose was to boost confidence after the start of the US Great Depression but eventually shifted to support the war effort by dispensing budgets as large as $6 billion annually.
Our group had a number of comments on this amazing chart. Jeff Harrison said, “This should be every org chart in every powerpoint from now on. It underlies the hidden structure of the universe: the Atom!” Richard Brath suggested, “Made physically, with springs, of course. Then a corporate re-org is just re-tuning of a couple of springs and then let it redo the layout automatically!”
October was a big month for Alexander von Humboldt. His great 17th-century work, named Kosmos, was the center of a number of articles, some of which even stirred up controversy. Writer Fosco Lucarelli describes Humboldt’s five-volume series thusly: “The writing was based on a series of lectures that Von Humboldt gave at the University of Berlin. The first volume conveys a ‘portrait of nature,’ the second a general history of science. The theoretical framework was based on the view of the orderliness of the cosmos, directly borrowed from ancient Greek philosophy, by which the laws of the Universe apply also on the apparent chaos of the Earth. The general harmony of the cosmos offers to the person who contemplates it, personal inspiration and a beneficial awareness about life.”
Paul Kahn added, “The Invention of Nature by Andrea Wulf is a wonderful recent intellectual biography of Humboldt. Kosmos comes at the end of a long and interesting life story. He is one of the greatest pioneers of visualization of the natural world.”
Speaking of laws of the universe, I shared some beautiful and compelling images from “The Archeometer: Key to All the Religions and All Sciences of Antiquity; Synthetic Reformation of All Contemporary Arts,” created by the French 19th-century occultist and magician (!!) Alexandre Saint-Yves. He describes the Archeometer as “the instrument used by the Ancients for the formation of the esoteric myths of all religions. It is the canon of ancient Art in its various architectural, musical, poetic, and theogonic manifestations. It is the Heaven that speaks: every star, every constellation becomes a letter or a phrase, or a divine name lighting the ancient traditions of all peoples with a new day.”
The Hedge Mason Blog writes, “Saint-Yves used the term Synarchy in his book La France vraie as a political response to the emergence of anarchist ideologies and movements; Synarchy, as opposed to anarchy. Saint-Yves hoped for a European society whose government would be composed of three councils, representing the economic, the judicial, and the scientific; a metaphysical chamber bound the whole structure together…. [he] gave an important role to esoteric societies which are composed of oracles and who safeguarded the government from behind the scenes. He was involved with a number of Freemasonic and other groups who claimed descent from the Knights Templars.”
Here’s the fascinating part: This book has been re-created by the Sacred Science Institute, a small publishing house in West Los Angeles, that specializes in English translations of books containing arcane knowledge of ancient systems.
Run by Brad Stewart, this 2007 LA Times article explains that his audience is “people who see geometrical connections between the architecture of Hindu temples and fluctuations in the Dow Jones industrial average … These book buyers tend to live in the world’s financial centers, such as New York City, Singapore, and London. The Sacred Science Institute is 12 years old and has published about 500 books, mostly rare financial market treatises. Most of his clients are fans of financial wizard W.D. Gann, whose century-old books are so dense that many students give up before gaining an inkling of his “square of nine” investment techniques. Stewart’s clients aren’t reading these texts to find coded references to Dell’s stock price on a specific date. They read to discern larger patterns in how the universe operates.”
It honestly doesn’t get any more interesting than this! You too can buy the book for $300 and it looks incredible!!
Here’s a plate from the Four Books on Measurement by Albrecht Dürer. It shows a sinusoidal curve which he derived from 12 points on a circle that Dürer calls a “screw-line.” Evidently, it was used by stonemasons. Dürer was one of the most important artists of the German Renaissance, a master printmaker, and visionary in every sense of the word. If you are interested, here’s a great article about his work and how it relates to Geometry: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1205.0080.pdf
It is a great visualization on its own, but I include it because the historical-viz channel conversations can often drift. It reminded George Levasser of a story from Richard Feynman’s book What Do You Care What Other People Think:
“I was a kid growing up in Far Rockaway, I had a friend named Bernie Walker. We both had “labs” at home, and we would do various “experiments.” One time, we were discussing something — we must have been eleven or twelve at the time — and I said, “But thinking is nothing but talking to yourself inside.
“Oh yeah?” Bernie said. “Do you know the crazy shape of the crankshaft in a car?”
“Yeah, what of it?”
“Good. Now, tell me: how did you describe it when you were talking to yourself?”
So I learned from Bernie that thoughts can be visual as well as verbal.”
Corey Thompson also shared his thoughts: “The screw-line is one of my favorite visualizations, although I’ve never seen this particular one.
I first recall seeing this contraption in a museum as a kid, where a wheel with a pencil on an arm would rotate and you would insert a sheet of thick paper into a mini-trolley system that would carry it along the wheel at a fixed pace. When you’re done, you just have the sine wave on the paper, but there were graphics that showed at what point in rotation each point on your sine wave was drawn with this diagram and they had markers to notate those points.
For the older kids, they challenged them to calculate at what time their points were drawn with reference to the trolley at the starting position. I remember I was in second grade and was so envious of the 5th graders who knew the mysterious “algebra” and were able to compute their time points.”
Richard Brath shared this “Zeppelin chart” from 1914 and commented: “Note the nonzero baseline but some darker tone at the bottom that I mistook for the ground from The Illustrated War News.”
The magazine The Illustrated London News began to publish illustrated reports of World War I shortly after it started as The Illustrated War News. It was designed in a unique portrait format just to cover the war with 48 pages of illustrations and was reputed to have the largest number of artist-correspondents reporting on the progress of the war.
It’s a fascinating look at a war that we don't naturally think of as being driven by technology. While the concept of the submarine has been around since Jules Verne captivated the world with Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, there were only a handful of actual submarines build in the 19th century, and they weren't used to any practical military advantage until WWI.
It’s easy to lose sight that the world of the early 20th-century was still brimming with the technological innovation that fueled the preceding century. We know the Wright Brothers' first flight was in 1903, but we forget that the Wright Model A was customized into the “Wright Military Flyer” in 1909! Indeed, the nascent 20th century was alive with military innovations, such as zeppelins, submarines, and airplanes, that the Illustrated War News dutifully illustrated with interesting cross-sections, diagrams, and photos. It’s a pity that such innovations were weaponized so early in their existence.
One of the aspects that I have come to relish about this kind of research on historic visualization is how it allows for all kinds of random learning. While I personally have little interest in military history, going down the rabbit hole of any individual chart always results in a wealth of learning. This (un?)structured learning inevitably links to other subjects and other ways to communicate complex ideas visually. Sometimes this shows the interesting interdependence on diagrams with photography or illustration, and other times it uncovers lesser-known authors or schools of thought. It’s always a fun time.
Jill Hubley shared this wonderful chart of “Population Distribution of National Types.” This map shows the distribution of ‘national types,’ including Anglo Saxon, Slav, French, German, Scandinavian, along with Reserves and Uninhabited Area. The color is beautiful and the inset pie charts show percentages in aggregate. Evidently, this was Murchie’s PhD thesis, along with the chart below, from the University of Minnesota and it is a testament to how beautiful data visualization can be.
Lastly, Paul Kahn shared “The Age of Reptiles” with me, which I then passed along to the channel. Rudolph F. Zallinger’s mural occupies the full length of the east wall of the Yale Peabody Museum’s Great Hall where it presides over the exhibition gallery. Built in 1925 to accommodate the skeletons of the Brontosaurus and other dinosaurs discovered and named by the museum’s founder, the mural is one of the largest in the world, measuring 110 by 16 feet. It required more than four and a half years (1943–1947) to complete.
Painted in the Renaissance fresco secco technique, the mural is a work of art that showcases a panorama of the evolutionary history of the earth — from the Devonian Period 362 million years ago to Cretaceous Period 65 million years ago. Based on the best scientific knowledge available at the time, the chronology of the mural reads from right to left and spans more than 300 million years, with the large foreground trees marking the boundaries between the geologic periods.
Zallinger recounts its creation: “During the 3 and 1/2 years I painted on the wall, the Great Hall was always open. Students, colleagues, and the general public thus had a rare opportunity to witness the gradual development of a large painting, created by means of a technique uncommon in the 20th century. I completed the painting on June 6, 1947. My mentor for technical information and aesthetic concerns was my long-time professor, faculty colleague, and friend Lewis Edwin York, chairman of the department of painting at the Yale School of the Fine Arts (1937–1950). His mentor in these matters was Daniel Varney Thompson, who was the primary translator of Cennino Cennini’s 15th-century tome about “the practice of the art.”… I will forever recall the day, when the painting was nearing completion, that York brought this living legend, Thompson, into the Great Hall and I was privileged to meet and talk to the man whom I had revered for so long. Professor York later told me that Thompson had stated, “That wall is the most important one since the 15th century” — debatable, of course, but, considering the source, most gratifying.”
Here’s a documentary about the mural:
And here’s some ACTUAL FOOTAGE of the “terrible lizards” on the rampage
OK! That’s it for this round. As always, there are new historical data visualizations being discovered and shared every day on the Data Visualization Society’s historical-viz channel! Join up for free, find something interesting, and post it to the group! New folks always encouraged!
More from the series:
