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The Petroleum Tree, 1957


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Here we have the Tree of Petroleum, the family structure of what comes from crude oil and ends up in your car, on your body, and in your food.   It’s rather creepy to have a whole branch devoted to wax that goes into all the various parts of your body, but it doesn’t sound so bad when the ingredient label calls it paraffin.  The tree includes a bunch of things that have most likely been replaced with less oil-dependent contents or eliminated by modern technology, such as fly spray, tree spray oil,  and lighthouse oil.    The most of it, however, should require reflection on everyone who demands that driving less will reduce dependency on oil.  There’s a lot more to petroleum products, of which gasoline is but one component in a process that produces a wide variety of products we use today.  The diagram is from the Book of Knowledge.

Wondering what happened to the Socony-Vacuum Oil Company?  They’re known by a much snappier name today.

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Meeting With A Buffalo, 1910s.

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“A Terrible Meeting With A Buffalo”, from The Book of Knowledge, 1910s. Caption text here.

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Jack’s Wonderful House, 1910s.

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A whimsical interpretation of the human body as a house, with Jack’s study at the top, and various windows and doors for sensory input to enter through. From a series of articles in The Book of Knowledge, 1910s. The articles may be an adaptation of this book, although I was unable to find any direct one-for-one quotes in The Book of Knowledge.

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Submarine Point-Of-View, 1910s.

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My impression of a submarine’s visual acuity was similar to a telescope: Square-jawed 1950s movie stars peering into a binocular-like apparatus suspended from the ceiling, ordering torpedoes to be fired. During and prior to WWI, submarines were just coming into their own, and would soon be the secret weapon to turn a war’s direction. The periscope, according to the image above, operated quite differently than my memories of mid-20th-century naval war movies. A bowl-shaped mirror was lifted, at the top of a tube, above the surface of the ocean. It reflected light down the viewing tube, projecting it, a’la camera obscura, on to a white tabletop for review by the captain and his officers. The bowl-shape projects the distended, distorted view seen in the image above. While this afforded an instant, at-a-glance view of the submarine’s surroundings, it did not provide the rangefinding, weapon-aiming, or navigation facilities that a modern sub enjoys. From The Book of Knowledge, published in the 1910s.

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Orthographic Ireland, 1910s.


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“Bird’s Eye” view of Ireland, an orthographic map of the Irish Isles. From The Book of Knowledge, 1910s.

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The Old Woman Tossed in a Basket, 1910s

An illustration of the Mother Goose rhyme The Old Woman Tossed in a Basket, from The Book Of Knowledge.