JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 142
July 17, 1909 was a red-letter day in the history of the graphical display of quantitative data. It was this issue of the Illustrated London News that appeared two large folding images depicting significant chunk of the British Navy. The fleet—or the greatest part of the Home and Atlantic Fleets under the command of Admiral Sir William May—was parked in the Thames for the better part of a week, and displayed for the lucky Londoners an unparalleled view of naval might, stretching out for some 40 miles.
The images depict 24 battleships, 16 armored cruisers, 55 torpedo craft, 20 protected cruisers, and 35 submarines, making about 150 vessels altogether, manned by 42,000 sailors. The list can go on for some bit, but what does this display of naval might the greatest imaginative leverage is this image that shows the fleet from a bird’s-eye view.
This picture certainly would’ve given fancy flight to even the most staid of British hearts*, seeing the ships displayed so rather than seeing simple numbers, and coming as it did during a time when the Foreign Office was making particularly loud noises about the continued imposing threats of the German naval machine. This was certainly a way of showing the people footing the bill just what their money was going towards, and it turns out that this is actually a pretty early effort at displaying everything in a statistic rather than justice describing it.
*There is actually a quote in the description of this scene from Rudyard Kipling, who upon seeing the armada weighed in with some tremendously turgid scribbling, a sort of pornography of bad prose, ending it all with a huge dollop of racially energetic solipsism.
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