Looking back on the visual legacy of the American Eugenics movement is quite fascinating. Aside from the historical photographs (always of interest) you are faced with a seemingly endless array of statistical data, a prospect which you’d intuit to be a rather dry affair. In looking, however, you find yourself alternately offended, amused, repulsed, empathic, and generally engaged. When was the last time a powerpoint pie chart made you uncomfortable or the bar graph in the margins of a trade magazine pissed you off?

The lingering power in much of the Eugenics material can be attributed to the fact it was aimed at a “general” audience. A large swath of it was created in an effort to sway the general populace toward its position. In as much there is often a strange marriage of dispassionate math with the visual language of tabloid journalism. The result being a surprising kind of statistical provocation that feels more akin to propaganda than science.

The diagrams and brochures and flash cards, meanwhile, which were not necessarily designed for public consumption, having been drawn up in a time well before our current notions of political correctness, seem to jump off the page in their bluntness, challenging our accepted decorum. In other cases the notions of heredity being explored, in this age prior to advances in genetic research, often juxtapose traits and classifications which illicit involuntary guffaws.

In few cases are the materials simply bland.

At bottom I’d say this is because the materials are always focussed on the one subject we, none of us, can ignore, which we all have opinions and ideas about- ourselves. Our favorite subject, and by extension our second favorite subject as well, how others are different from ourselves.

In any case having come across the mother load of visual material that is The Eugenics Archive I thought I’d draw your attention to just a few representative items in their collection for your offense, amusement, repulsion and engagement-

At this point, so many years later, these items fascinate not particularly because of the data they convey but because of their method of conveyance- surely a failing from a statistical standpoint, but not from an ideological one. Which it could be argued was really the whole aim of the enterprise anyway. They sure push all the age old buttons don’t they? The same ones which our politicians and ideologues, not coincidentally, are still pushing.

Taken on the whole, with the parade of references to insanity, albinism, neurosis, sex crimes, feeblemindedness, gigantism, larceny, “pauperism,” schizophrenia, “idiocy,” achondroplasia, promiscuity, murder, epilepsy, hypertrichosis, and “natural ventriloqual power,” immersion for any period of time in these materials makes you feel as though you were wandering through an Hieronymus Bosch painting. ‘Course, I always thought Bosch had an almost preternatural talent for capturing the reality of humanity in his fantasy, so perhaps that’s as it should be.

Hope you… enjoyed?

Let’s do a visualization exercise.

Try to let go of your movie-induced visions of post-apocalyptic struggle, centered on flesh eating irradiated men, broken eyeglasses, and thunderdomes, and focus instead on standing in a dark, rubble-strewn bunker trying to make heads or tail out of a (greek to me) number-laden slide rule… do you see what I see?

Now that’s horror!

(Why, oh why, am I so unprepared? And why did I take so many gad damned Humanities courses anyway? Fucking art school!)

Personally I don’t remember ever even seeing one of these items first hand. That seems to have as much to do with the timing of my birth (1974) as with my decidedly hippy-leaning parentage. Let’s look to John Walker (maintainer of fourmilab.ch and co-author of AutoCAD) for some firsthand accounting-

Quote: “Anyway, when some champion of human liberty in a Che Guevara T-shirt and Mao jacket was haranguing his audience with claims like “A single Hiroshima bomb set off downtown would annihilate this university and all of us in the blink of an eye”, what better way to burnish one’s Strangelovian credentials than to whip out a handy-dandy nuclear bomb computer slide rule, whip—slip—slide, and interrupt, “Naaah . . . fifteen kilotons at five miles? Surface burst? Why, that’s only a quarter to a third of a pound per square inch overpressure—it’ll probably break some window glass but that’s about it.” Flipping the slide rule over, “The flash isn’t even enough to cause sunburn, and the immediate radiation is next to nothing.” For some unfathomable reason, this never seemed to either carry the argument or suitably impress chicks.

Back in those psychedelic days of yore, you could order your own fantastic pastel plastic nuclear bomb effects computer directly from the U.S. Government Printing Office for a single green dollar, and for three dollars more, obtain the authoritative 730 page book, The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, upon which it was based. With the winding down of the nuclear arms race and eventual end of the Cold War, interest in the actual consequences of setting off nuclear weapons waned. The book and computer were last updated in 1977, and subsequently went out of print.”

Indeed.

Well that explains why when I look at one of these circular slide rules all I see is some nifty looking, though totally opaque, information design and why rather than envisioning all sorts of weighty cause and effect scenarios my first thoughts are instead, “mmmm pretty” and “I bet Tufte would approve of those.” Have a look at some for yourself and see what you think.

I must admit the very thought of some determined engineer brandishing one of these after a bomb blast, to calmly draw even a smidgeon of rational data out of the situation, is a heartening thought. Where as most of us would immediately set about trying to cobble together flying machines out of lawnmower parts or riot down at the sporting-goods store in covetous search of hockey masks and shoulder pads some among us might yet be able to do something useful.

Obviously the slide rule in general has largely become a outmoded technology with the coming of the scientific calculator and more recently, these, how-you-say, computronics. But as with all technological corpses there remains a fervent underground of admirers and collectors who keep a fire burning in the tomb. Which in the case of slide rules, nuclear themed specimens especially, is a blessing. After all with a few well placed electromagnetic pulses -care of some lovely nuclear explosions- they could very quickly return to state of the art, technophile coveted, status.

If you’re a true technology junky and want to get a jump on the apocalyptic gadget frenzy (sure to be kicked off in the pages of the mimeographed editions of endgadget and gizmodo) or would simply like to feel less stupid when all hell breaks loose, Fourmilab offers the Build Your Own Nuclear Bomb Effects Computer page as a public service.

Happy computing!

The images in this post were adapted from the following:
ORAU’s page on Nuclear Slide Rules
Cyberheritage.org’s Pounds House, Plymoth

For a bit more-

Micro-history of the slide-rule
Wiki history of the slide rule
Curious Lee

Lastly, I ought to mention that the slide rules pictured here were chosen not for their visual niftiness but strictly for their function. There are MANY handsome looking slide rules to be seen out there which would surely prove inspirational to purveyors of information graphics and retro-design lovers alike. I can recommend the following-

Rekeninstrumenten’s slide rule catalog
Sphere’s circular slide rules page and slide rule universe
Greg’s slide rules
Slide rule museum

Hope you enjoyed.

There are three kinds of stick charts.

The “MATTANG” or “WAPPEPE” is a small, square shaped chart which shows wave patterns around a single island or atoll and was used for teaching purposes only.

The “REBBELIB” is a general wave navigational chart mapping an entire chain, showing the relationships between the islands and the major ocean swells.

The “MEDO” covers only a few islands and is useful for specific voyages.

The charts were made by men from thin strips of coconut frond midribs or pandanus root. They were then bound together with coconut sennit in geometric patterns depicting sea currents around the low lying atolls. Small money cowrie shells or coral pebbles indicated islands and curved sticks represent wave patterns.

They were not carried on a voyage and the adult navigator gauged the wave patterns represented in the Stick Charts entirely by his sense of touch. “He would crouch in the bow of his canoe and literally feel every motion of the vessel.” As with ripples in a pond they “concentrated on refraction of swells as they came in contact with undersea slopes of islands and the bending of swells around islands as they interacted with swells coming from opposite directions.”

A fascinating aspect of the charts is that they varied so much in form and interpretation that they were “readable” only by the specific navigators who constructed them. Evidently the knowledge contained in each was a closely guarded secret.

Wikipedia says: “The stick charts are a significant contribution to the history of cartography because they represent a system of mapping ocean swells, which was never before accomplished. They also use different materials than is common in other parts of the world. They are an indication that ancient maps may have looked very different, and encoded different features from the earth, than the maps we use today.”

Use of stick charts and navigation by swells apparently came to demise after World War II, when travel between islands by canoe halted. They continue to be made in Polynesia, though very few people are able to use them as navigation aids. They are made and sold instead as tourist souvenirs.

For much more info see the following (images and text were adapted from these):

Wikipedia entry.
Reading Patterns in the Waves.
Ethnomathics Digital Library.
Digital Micronesia.
Micronesian Stick Charts.
Mariner’s Museum.
The Leek-Green Sea.
Stick Charts.
Visit Marshall Islands.com
THe British Museum.
The Met.
World Weather, Climate, and Society Projects.
And Lastly I’d like to recommend the following for some interesting context-
Varieties of Unreligious Experience.

Hope you enjoyed.

So simple, so elemental, so tiny and gorgeous. The fact that so many of these survive came as a bit of a surprise to me, delicate as they are. That so many of them are for sale and can be bought, greedily, by yours truly amazes me. I plan to build a back-lit display in my office, or alternately take a few prized samples, scan them at ultra-high res, and reproduce them huge… voila! perfectly modern art for the discerning, science lovin, design dork. (Coudal swap meat here I come.)

The majority of the samples above were taken from the following sources:

Darwin Country.

The Gemmary.

The Manchester Microscopical Society.

ebay.

For a bit more see:

Ars Mechanica

Microscopy UK.

Hope you enjoyed.

Click each for the full (front and back) “postcard” version.

Last year’s

Hope your loved ones and arch enemies will enjoy these.

See below for a sampling of these evolving objects and further quotes from Mr Mandel’s beautiful (though it would seem, out of print) book.

Iron scissors. Eastern Mediterranean, 14th Century.

2nd century A.D. Trabzon, northeastern Turkey.

Household Scissors. Italy, about 1550.

Persian Tailoring Scissors. 17th Century.

Tang Dynasty (618-907), 7th to 9th Century.

Candle-Trimmers. Italy, 16th Century.

Medieval Scissors.

Tinsmith’s Shears. Spain, 17th Century.

Viticulture Scissors. Italy, 19th Century.

Areca Nut Scissors. India, 18th Century.

Sugar-loaf Scissors. Brussels and Munich, 17th Century.

Shears / Detachable Blades. Italy, 1890.

Neoclassical era Italy or France, about 1820.

Decorated Steel Fretwork. England, 1875.

Calligrapher’s Scissors. Turkey, 18th Century.

Shaped like a stork carrying a baby. England.

Embroidery Scissors. The Romantic Age, France.

Cigar Cutters. Italy, 1915.

Egg Scissors. France, 1930.

Unknown. Housed at the Fairfield Museum.

It would seem that from the industrial revolution onward scissors returned for the most part to their previous state, as purely functional items. Most traces of decoration have been absent ever since, in favor of a clean-lined, stainless-steel functionality.

Unfortunately scissors seem to be one of those items for which there is very little said on the internet from an historical standpoint. Massimiliano Mandel’s book book then is a great resource. Most, but not all, of the images above were taken from it and it contains many more, including quite a few reproductions of the scissors’ first appearances in art and print. If you are a design buff be on the lookout for it.

Hope you enjoyed.

-

Note: to the best of my knowledge the scissors pictured above are housed in the following Collections-

The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The Fairfield Museum in Bothwell, Ontario.
The Giuseppina Gioacchino Collection.
The Museum of Archeology in Konya Turkey.
The Museum of Decorative Arts, Paris.
The Anita Gatti Collection, Milan.
The GBZ Foundation for Paleontological Studies, Milan.

Another after effect of mega-fires like London’s was Fire Insurance, and it was these Insurance companies that actually formed the first private fire brigades to protect their client’s properties. The naming of streets in London at this point was haphazard at best, and private homes were not numbered,  so as a means for the Insurance Brigades to distinguish their properties, each company adopted a distinctive emblem, and began attaching it, in the form of brightly colored metal plates, to the sides of their policy holder’s buildings. These were called “Fire Marks” and their use was widespread for about two hundred and fifty years all across Europe, in Russia, and eventually the U.S.

Practical and utilitarian as they were, they also happened to be pretty damned gorgeous. See below for a sampling and links to some sites where you can see more.

Most of the marks pictured above originated at Roy Addis’Firemarks.co.uk and Dmitry Nikulin’s Old Russian Fire marks pages. Both of which are chock full of beautiful pieces. If you have any interest in Fire marks I’d recommend these sites as your first stops. Believe me when I say what I’ve shown here is only the tip of the iceberg. All but the last of the extra-large images are taken from Clarence P. Hornung’s Treasury of American Design (incredible book!) published in 1950.

A couple of other destinations to see more are: Vicasa, Firemarks.net, Hammerdown,  Erie Insurance, and Iicfiremark.

To read more in depth info on their history I recommend The Fire Mark Circle’s history pages. Also American Fire Marks, A Good Story.

Hope you enjoyed.