This is a project that I developed some time ago and that I have just announced in Kickstarter. This is an infographic poster with a multitude of curiosities about our planet. Would you like to find out what it is? You have all the details here:
With this project you will not only have the opportunity to get the downloadable version of the poster for high quality printing, but if you don’t already have the 2018 version of Maptorian (my vector world maps collection), you can get it along with the poster.
Possibly someone else tried it before, but at least the historical memory points to Nadar, pseudonym of Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, a French journalist and photographer, as the first person to take an aerial photograph.
It turns out that Nadar was a good cartoonist, highly valued for his drawings of politicians and people of high society. A friend advised him to buy a camera, with which to take pictures that would serve as a basis for the drawings.
He bought the camera and never gave up his love of the new technique capable of catching the light. Well, what I want to refer in this article are not the painter-photographer’s artistic ideas, but his brilliant idea of climbing into a balloon with the camera.
This happened in 1856, when no one had apparently thought of the simple idea of taking pictures from the air… until these moment. This simple gesture ushered in a new era in the understanding of the space we inhabit, a technology that, more than a century later, has borne fruit like Google Maps and other similar applications. Naturally, the first to realize the importance of the photographs taken from above were the military, who soon took advantage of the strategic capacity that aerial photography provided them.
Here is, as a tribute to Nadar, one of his photographs taken from a balloon, one of the first ever taken from above. Specifically, the image was capted in Paris, at the Champ de Mars, on October 18, 1863.
Roger Hayward was an American artist as well as an inventor, almost forgotten today. He died in 1979, having spent eight decades in this world, which filled with a multitude of activities. In addition to being an excellent painter and sculptor, he also worked on various architectural projects and, during the 1930s and 1940s, was a kind of “orchestra man” at the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles.
Roger Hayward, in 1934, working on a model of the lunar surface with almost 25 meters in diameter. (Image: Los Angeles Public Library, Security National Bank Collection, The Linus Pauling Blog).
Hayward was involved in optical tasks as he was in preparing the illustrations for exhibition panels. In 1945 he patented a Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope camera and later worked closely with the great Linus Pauling to create illustrations of molecular structures. However, if there is one project that can be considered his masterpiece, along with his other patents on various optical devices, is their great Moon models.
Walt Disney with one of Hayward’s moon models in 1955.
Yes, because from photographs taken by means of telescopes of the surface visible from the Earth of our natural satellite, Hayward created several lunar models, like realistic giant sculptures, which were used in the cinema, museum and exhibitions. Some have been lost, which is a pity, but others can still be contemplated, such as the present in the Griffith Observatory.
You look at it and at first it looks like a normal Porsche 924, a classic’ 70s and’ 80s car with nothing out of the ordinary. But, when you look at a little more, there are things that don’t add up and you start to think that there is something wrong with this vehicle….
Why are the mirrors placed like this? Are the rear wheels directional? Wait… why are the seats looking backwards?
Even the MythBusters decided to modify a Porsche 928 in this way…
Porsche fans had been listening for many years that the aerodynamics of some models, such as the 924 or 928, were “wrong”. Come on, they could run faster and more efficiently if you turn them around.
Back in 1992, the Dutch designer Oskar de Kiefte, known for his strange conversions of all kinds of vehicles, discovered that the Porsche house itself had already seen the problem in its wind tunnel tests (the myth claimed it was, indeed, the results of the test in the tunnel with the car “upside down” had been surprising, something that the American designer Norman Bell Geddes had already studied many years ago in some vehicles of his time). The fact is that Oskar de Kiefte decided to go beyond the wind tunnel and create a work of art on this idea of the “reverse car”. Thus, starting from a crazy idea, the two inverted Porsches of the Dutchman, a Porsche 924 and a 928, were born, which were the attraction of various exhibitions on automobile design.
The History of Medicine tells that, back in 1877, as an assistant to the great Robert Koch (known mainly for his work on tuberculosis, as well as for being the father of medical microbiology), an idea emerged in the mind of the German physician Julius Richard Petri. There must have been some way to facilitate the handling of microbial cultures and, out of that discomfort, the famous Petri dishes were born.
Specially designed for bacterial cultures, mould and other microorganisms, these dishes continue to be used in microbiology. Another technique developed at the same time and which, together with the Petri dishes, turns out to be a magnificent canvas for a certain type of art, continues to be used. Let’s see, around 1881 the doctor Walther Hesse, also a disciple of Koch, perfected a technique by which he could cultivate microorganisms in an appropriate and practical way, which until then was a real nightmare. After much rehearsal, it was his wife, Fanny Hesse, who gave birth to the idea of using an algae-derived extract known as agar-agar as a culture medium (she had used this material in jams for years). Agar-agar was shown to be ideal for gelling the culture medium, resulting in a material that remains solid at room temperature. It is a translucent medium in which bacteria grow at ease, making it easier to identify the colonies.
Some of Alexander Fleming’s microbial paints. Imperial College Healthcare – NHs Trust.
So we already have the above-mentioned canvas, a petri dish, and a medium for bacterial culture, agar-agar. From there, to create works of art, there is only one step. Fanny Hesse herself, who was an excellent painter, produced several works in which she immortalized some microbial cultures. Now, it’s not about painting what you see in a lab, it’s about painting with your own bacteria (or fungi) growing! In this way the microbial art was born, which consists of “painting” using as canvas petri dishes with cultures of different types of microorganisms, usually using agar-agar as a medium. Bacteria, fungi or yeasts can be used with their original colours, or fluorescent (under suitable light) or with various pigments. Once the microorganisms have grown according to the patterns drawn on the plate, the result is fixed with synthetic resin and, that’s it, we have a work of microbial art.
Interestingly, one of the most famous microbial “painters” was Alexander Fleming, discoverer of the antibiotic action of lysozyme and penicillin. In fact, Fleming had been an amateur painter for years, being a member of art groups and the like, so it is not surprising that he ended up creating art with microorganisms and petri dishes. Okay, the results were simple, but they have their charm and the technique is far from simple. It is necessary to select the appropriate microorganisms, their colors, trace the pattern by means of grooves in the agar-agar medium on the petri dish and then deposit each type of microorganism in the appropriate place, so that they grow following the pattern marked in a few controlled times. It has complications, no doubt. Today these curious works of art are housed in the Alexander Fleming Laboratory Museum at Imperial College Healthcare – NHs Trust.
