too many interests

In this short post I look at some illustrations produced by the Weimar era popular science writer and illustrator Fritz Kahn. Theses illustrations are interesting because they break with Kahn’s more popular man-as-machine metaphor (which I have explored in The Body Machines of Fritz Kahn) by depicting the body as a fantastic landscape. Produced early in Kahn’s career to me these illustrations present a more traditional and romantic view of the body than Kahn’s later work.

This first image is illustrates the glands of the skin as chimneys on the hand:

Chimneys of the Skin

The next image depicts the inside of blood vessels and could be considered a bit of a stretch as a body-landscape. However, I have seen exactly the same illustration in another Kahn publication with the sole addition of small fairy-people riding on-top of the blood cells through the vein. Unfortunately I seem to have lost the image at some point in my move from Toronto.

The Vein as a Tunnel

A bit more of a stretch is this illustration labeled “how the dessert cleans the tongue” where the tongue is a landscape being worked on by little figures who represent various foods and drinks. The reason this is a stretch is that the meme of little people working (and carrying out tasks) inside the body is very common in Kahn’s illustrations, including his body-machine images.  This image is part of a series of fascinating illustrations dealing with eating habits and I will definitely do a full post on in this topic in the future.

How the Dessert Cleans the Tongue

Next is an illustration meant to show the spead of the neural impulse compared to the speed of contemporary air travel and wireless communication. Interesting here is the choice of North and South America as the comparitive landscape, probably related to Kahn’s move to the United States following being smuggled out of Nazi Germany just before the outbreak of World War Two.

The Speed of the Neural Impluse

This last illustration is my favorite of the series and the image that prompted this quick post. This illustration is of a landscape drawn from the perspective of a person inside the nose looking out.

Through the Proboscis Darkly

Related Posts:

• The Body Machines of Fritz Kahn
• The Cycles of Virtue and Substance: Fritz Kahn and the Chemical Cycles of Man and Machine
• Illustrating the Incomprehendable

Here is another illustration from Fritz Kahn’s encyclopediatic series of books “Das Leben des Menschen; eine volkstümliche Anatomie, Biologie, Physiologie und Entwick-lungs-geschichte des Menschen” (The Life of Humans: A Popular Anatomy, Biology, Physiology and a History of the Development of Humans) titled “In 70 Years the Man Eats 1,400 Times its Weight” which purports to show the amount of food the average man eats in 70 years as train cars full of food.

In 70 Years the Man Eats 1,400 Times its Weight

I was reminded of this particular illustration by an image I recently saw on Ptak Science Books (a blog that I can really only describe as a repository of wonderfully eclectic science and technology illustrations) which attempted to show 12,000 employees leaving a tire factor. Ptak uses it to illustrate the number of casualties of the Battle of the Somme (The Department of What Things Look Like: the Casualties of the Somme, Visualized) a task which is as monumental as it is heatbreaking. Here is a small version of the image for the purpose of comparison, but please go see his blog for a full sized image as well as many other wonderful things:

Here is another image from Ptak (A 117×1 Mile Blanket of Planes: What 185,000 Planes Looks Like) which uses a similar visual style to, this time from the London Illustrated News and showing the number of aircraft the United States planned to produce between 1942-194.

Which reminds me of one last illustration in which Kahn uses industrial metaphores to show incomprehensible numbers. Named “The Amazing Pump Within Our Bodies” this illustration uses a tanker trunks and a skyscraper to illustrate the amount of blood the heart pumps during one’s lifetime:

The Amazing Pump Within our Bodies

Unfortunately I’ve lost the source for this image.

Related Posts:

• The Body Machines of Fritz Kahn
• The Cycles of Virtue and Substance: Fritz Kahn and the Chemical Cycles of Man and Machine

In my previous post on the early 20th century science writer and illustrator Fritz Kahn (The Body Machines of Fritz Kahn) I explored how Kahn’s human-machine analogies broke down the barriers between humans and machines. In this post I want to look at some striking illustrations produced by Kahn of chemical cycles and how these images further located industrial machines as part of a single unitary nature.

The Cycle of Carbon Dioxide

This first image “The Cycle of Carbon Dioxide” is a fairly standard illustration showing the carbon-oxygen cycle in its relationship to man and plants. The illustration shows an early example of some of Kahn’s iconic methods, including using lines to depict the rays of the sun shining down and a rather stylized Germanic figure as his representation of man. The illustrations uses color to depict the functional path of the chemicals (an expensive technique at the time) with oxygen shown in blue and both carbon and carbon-dioxide shown in red. The tree has fruit only on the right hand — or carbon — side of the illustration, which is then connected with the man’s stomach, presumably both in terms of input and output.The symbols and colors were apparently a recent innovation of academic chemistry, although I have lost the citation that confirms this fact.

The Circulation of Water

The next image shows the “circulation of water” and is another fairly conventional image in that it does not transgress any traditional human-machine boundaries. On the left is a familiar water cycle — shown in blue — with ’steam’ shown rising from the ’sea’ and raining down on the earth where it runs back into the sea. On the right there are plants and an animal along with a man drinking from a cup.

I am not entirely sure what the barrel beside the man is suppose to represent. Presumably it contains the water, beer or wine that the man is drinking, although there appears to be a dark liquid pouring from the barrel onto the ground and although I doubt it is human or animal waste I have to admit that this was my first thought on seeing the image.

Now things get more interesting as Kahn starts placing machines and heavy industry into his illustrations. The next image is dramatically titled “The Cycle of Virtue and Substance” and prominently places both machines (in the form of a steam engine on the right hand side) and heavily industry (in the from of smokestacks in the background)  with the carbon-oxygen cycles which Kahn has already explored in a more conventional form.

The Cycle of Virtue and Substance

This is definitely my favorite image of the batch. The engine on the right is compared to the man on the left, with a fruit-bearing tree in the center connecting the two. In the background there are massed silhouettes of both human figures and huge industrial buildings and smokestacks. The comparison between the man and the engine is explicit: both consume the carbon and oxygen produced by the tree and both produce carbon dioxide which is then taken up by the tree, as well as fertilizer in the form of the human’s droppings (Kot) and the engine’s ash (Asche).

The title itself, “Der Kreislauf von Kraft und Stoff” (the cycles of virtue and substance) suggests more than just a objective illustration of how machines exchange chemicals in ways analogous to humans and plants or a pedagological method. The suggestion, I think, is the nourishing effects of industrial production on nature.

This image reminds me of another image that I used in my earlier post on Kahn called “Man and Machine” which also placed man and machine on equal functional grounds.

Man and Machine

This last illustration, “The Building of Carbohydrates by Plants” also gives prominent placement to industry in a chemical cycle. Although this illustration is mostly concerned with the formation of different types of plant material, Kahn again includes factories and smokestacks in the background.

The Building of Carbohydrates by Plants

These images (with the exception of “Man and Machine” which is from “Man in Structure and Function”) are from Kahn’s encyclopedian publication “The Life of Humans: A Popular Anatomy, Biology, Physiology and a History of the Development of Humans” (Das Leben des Menschen; eine volkstümliche Anatomie, Biologie, Physiologie und Entwick-lungs-geschichte des Menschen) which was published in Stuttgart 1929 by Kosmos Gesellschaft der Naturfreunde, a “Society of Friends of Nature” which published popular science books and periodicals and is apparently still active in some form today. This massive 5 volume set included more than 1600 pages, 1000 illustrations and almost 50 color prints and sets the iconography for many of Kahn’s later illustrations.

A final note: Those looking closely may notice that some of these images are signed by artists other than Fritz Kahn. At the time it was common for many different artists to work under one main illustrator who produces the entire work. In Kahn’s early work many illustrations bare the marks and signatures while in his later works he placed a “FK” trademark over the original artists signature.

Related Posts:

• The Body Machines of Fritz Kahn