This is a solar-powered generator. A funnel with sides angled at 90 degrees is pointed at the sun to catch its radiation, and those rays are bounced by the funnel’s mirrored walls toward… Read the rest “Science Art: Mouchot’s solar thermal collector from 1860, from Nordisk Familjebok, 1917.”
There’s a killer on the road indeed. The WPA released this poster to discourage drunk driving, or at least running your hotrod on moonshine.
Public health has never been this metal… Read the rest “Science Art: Don’t Mix ‘Em!, by Robert Lachenman for the Work Projects Administration, 1936.”
This tasty-looking fruit is from a medical text – Medical Botany: or, Illustrations and Descriptions of the Medicinal Plants of the London, Edinburgh, and Dublin Pharmacopoeias;… Read the rest “Science Art: Punica Granatum, 1829”
Two cats at dusk, growling in the snow.
The nights have been long, but they’re growing shorter.
May you survive your own lonely wilderness and find warmth and companionship where … Read the rest “Science Art: Lynxes, by Louis Sargent, 1909”
This is an illustration from a 1937 edition of Natural History magazine, an article called “Chinese Design.” This is a “Disk of Heaven,” or bi, a slightly mysterious… Read the rest “Science Art: Ancient Ritual White Jade Disk of Heaven…, 1937”
This is the cover of a report on the Teledyne Ryan Aeronautical “Navy Mini-Drone (STARS),” otherwise known as the Manta Ray. It was a fiberglass remote-controlled drone; … Read the rest “Science Art: Ryan 262 Manta Ray: Program Status Report cover, 1975”
This is a… well, it’s pretty self-explanatory, really. Unlike most of the images collected here, it’s got its own description printed right on it. These are alien planets,… Read the rest “Science Art: Exoplanets Poster, Institute of Physics, 2023”
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.
It’s basically a giant fan sending a jet of… Read the rest “Science Art: Avro Canada VZ-9AV Avrocar.”
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 mic. Rakish angle, sporty blue… Read the rest “Science Art: Turner +2: The Best CB Microphone in the World, 1966.”
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, all kinds of eyes. The book … Read the rest “Science Art: Diagram illustrating the inherent conspicuousness of an eye-spot…, Cott, 1942.”
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 on archive.org… Read the rest “Science Art: Altitude and azimuth instrument, 1876.”
“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 George Gaylord… Read the rest “Science Art: Sea Sirens, by A.A. Jansson, 1930.”
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 Wikimedia, where it was uploaded from the National… Read the rest “Science Art: 821393 – Flying Machine – Wright Brothers, May 22, 1906.”
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 Electrical Experimenter, a Hugo Gernsback publication,… Read the rest “Science Art: Two-Step Multi-Audi-Fone ad, 1916.”
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 in the Mimiviridae… Read the rest “Science Art: Cafeteria virion by the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics ViralZone.”
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