JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
This is a simple integrative and comparative display of information that has a decided and unexpected twist to it. The graphic is on salt and salt production, and appears in the Scientific American in December 1908, and it is in the top frame that I find the extracurricular attraction. Here we see the representation of what one part of the world--Capitol Hill in Washington D.C.--would look like it if all the oceans in the world were dehydrated: the globe would be covered by 112 feet of salt. When I think of salt I can come up with the curative and ceremonial uses of it, plus as a wound disinfectant, an exchange unit, being the "salt of the earth", and so on. But when I see the dome of the Capitol building being smothered by salt it becomes very Old Testament-y to me: Lot's wife, putting salt in a wound, and of course the big one, salting your defeated enemy's lands to ruin their soil and force them to move on. Anyway, that's just me--the image puts me in a very J.G. Ballard/Drowned World frame of mind. The rest of the graphic is pretty good, measuring salt production with an Eiffel-towered-sized barrel; but it is the D.C. image that is the most striking thing about this think-piece.
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