Science Art | The Guild of Scientific Troubadours

Scientific illustration of an Avrocar, a silver, disc-shaped aerial vehicle, gleaming steel and black vents, parked outside a shaded hangar.

Science Art: Avro Canada VZ-9AV Avrocar.

26 November 2023 grant 0

This is not a movie prop, but a working prototype of the Avrocar, a disc-shaped flying machine that graced the skies between 1959 and 1961. […]

Scientific illustration of a CB microphone. Well, an ad of one, anyway. Very mid-century lines on this this microphone. It could practically be a Chrysler tailfin.

Science Art: Turner +2: The Best CB Microphone in the World, 1966.

19 November 2023 grant 0

This is an ad from the April 1966 “Tools and Test Measurement Issue” of Popular Electronics, which I found on archive.org. Lovely design on this […]

Scientific Illustration depicting how eye-spots draw attention even in a confusing visual field.

Science Art: Diagram illustrating the inherent conspicuousness of an eye-spot…, Cott, 1942.

13 November 2023 grant 0

An illustration showing how noticeable an eye actually is, from the text The Vertebrate Eye and Its Adaptive Radiation, which looks at eyes, eyes everywhere, […]

Scientific illustration of a machine to track the height of a thing.

Science Art: Altitude and azimuth instrument, 1876.

5 November 2023 grant 0

How high? This device will tell you. It’s from The great Centennial exhibition critically described and illustrated, by Phillip T. Sandhurst, which you can read […]

Science Art: Sea Sirens, by A.A. Jansson, 1930.

30 October 2023 grant 0

“The efforts made by oversober scientists to reduce such marvels to coldly reasonable origins have in a few specific cases been only too successful,” wrote […]

Scientific Illustration of the Wright Brothers' airplane in the patent application.

Science Art: 821393 – Flying Machine – Wright Brothers, May 22, 1906.

23 October 2023 grant 0

It’s an airplane. Maybe the airplane. And this is how it looked when the U.S. Patent Office made it official. I found the illustration on […]

Scientific illustration of early radio equipment, in an advertisement for the Two-Step Multi-Audi-Fone, which comes with a pocket receiver and a "special head set." The M.A.F. costs $60 unless you order it after October 1, in which case it's $75. Which is quite a lot in 1916 dollars.

Science Art: Two-Step Multi-Audi-Fone ad, 1916.

16 October 2023 grant 0

This is an ad from, as Thomas Dolby put it, the Golden Age of wireless. More literally, it’s from the October, 1916, issue of The […]

Scientific illustration showing the inside of a virus, specifically a Rheavirus (aka Cafeteriavirus). It looks a little like a 20-sided die from Dungeons & Dragons that's been covered with lizard skin.

Science Art: Cafeteria virion by the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics ViralZone.

8 October 2023 grant 0

It looks like a D20 wrapped in iguana leather and filled with caramel and chocolate sprinkles. It’s actually a rheavirus, also known as cafeteriavirus. It’s […]

Scientific illustration of the solar system, as a map of the night sky, from the 1800s. It's like a Victorian planetarium.

Science Art: Planetary Systems, with Five Opening Flaps, from Geographical Studies by Levi Walter Yaggy, 1887.

1 October 2023 grant 0

I found this fascinating artifact in a wonderful article in Public Domain Review about Yaggy’s maps, pop-ups, and 3D diagrams of the Earth’s surface, habitats, […]

Scientific illustration of the structure of a dopamine molecule in three dimensions.

Science Art: Dopamine 3D spacefill, by Jynto.

24 September 2023 grant 0

Alright, I know what you animals really want. You want that hit of this stuff – the good stuff. Social media, gambling, narcotics, sky diving […]

Scientific illustration of a raspberry beetle, from Nordisk familjebok

Science Art: The beetle (Byturus tomentosus) living on raspberry, from Nordisk familjebok, 1920

17 September 2023 grant 0

A raspberry beetle and its favorite fruit, from a very special category on Wikimedia Commons. We do love an encyclopedia.

Scientific illustration comparing the sizes of planets and stars - how much bigger Jupiter is than Earth, or the Sun than Jupiter, or Sirius than the Sun.

Science Art: Comparison of planets and stars (2017 update), by Dave Jarvis and Jcpag2012.

11 September 2023 grant 0

This is another way of doing a Cosmic Zoom, comparing the sizes of astronomical things. If you’ve wondered how many Earths could fit inside Arcturus, […]

Scientific illustration of a mollusk. Perhaps a nautilus. Perhaps a snail. It's a simple line drawing, true to life, yet mysterious.

Science Art: From Notes on Cephalopods from Northern California, 1967.

3 September 2023 grant 0

I thought this was a nautilus, but it might be a moon snail. It’s a mollusk of some kind, with a gracefully curved shell and […]

Scientific illustration in the form of a dramatic black and white photograph of a highly reflective sphere in the middle of a vast hangar lit by horizontal rows of lights so long, they seem to radiate out from a point of convergence somewhere behind the inflatable spacecraft.

Science Art: ECHO 100′ Satellite Inflation Tests, 1958.

28 August 2023 grant 0

A satellite that is also a balloon, as inflated at NASA’s Langley Research Center in 1958. I found this image gleaming in the NASA Image […]

Scientific illustration of a planet illuminated (or perhaps formed) by a circle of orbital lights, shining down in many colors; an illustration of computer networking in a pre-internet age.

Science Art: Information Display front cover, 1972

21 August 2023 grant 0

This is the cover of the 1972 March/April issue of Information Display, Vol 9 No 2, from archive.org. Stories inside include ways to project different-sized […]