Chapter 54
Hogging the limelight from the other 283 exhibits at the 1958 American Medical Association convention in San Francisco was surrealist Salvador Dali’s design for Wallace Laboratories’ Miltown, considered the first true tranquilizer. Until then the dominant sedative was phenobarbital, which Bayer AG had announced in 1912, and which anxious Americans gobbled roughly 1.5 million doses of in 1947. Then, in 1950, Frank Berger and Bernard Ludwig of Wallace Laboratories—a subsidiary of Carter Products, famed for its Carter’s Little Liver Pills, Arrid antiperspirant, and Nair depilatory—synthesized meprobamate, a compound that calmed agitated mice and monkeys. When the compound appeared commercially in 1955, it was named Miltown for a pastoral New York village, the kind of hamlet where one expects every waking moment would be a Norman Rockwell illustration. Despite the bubonic prevalence of anxiety—in 1962, for example, it ranked as the most widespread mental ailment with about twelve million sufferers, three times the number of those diagnosed with depression—sales initially were as sluggish as its users. Then, supply happily collided with demand, and by 1956, a dumbfounding 5 percent of Americans had tried it. No drug in the United States had ever been in such demand.
The capstone to Miltown’s commercial salvation arrived in the form of Gala Dali, Salvador Dali’s wife, muse, and brass-balled business manager. A Miltown enthusiast, Gala approached Wallace Laboratories and suggested it hire her surrealist spouse to map the journey from being a rolled-up ball of tensions, fears, and worries to someone possessing the calm of a field of fresh, untrammeled snow.
The result was Crisalida, a sixty-foot-long, 2.5-ton, walk-through cocoon that would illustrate man’s transfiguration from “the evils of nightmares” to “divine and paradisiac dreams.” Made of parachute silk, Crisalida wriggled like a caterpillar thanks to a mechanical system pumping air inside it. When guests entered the billowing white tunnel, they encountered a trio of figures: a man with hubcap-sized gaps in his body, clutching a staff topped with a butterfly representing human anxiety; a female figure with a head with wings, who also grasped a staff capped with a moth; and a third figure signifying what Dali called “the true butterfly of tranquility,” a damsel dressed with a head composed of blue, red, and yellow flowers. To Dali, the exhibit plainly explained how Miltown transformed people from a grubby caterpillar in a gray flannel suit to an otherworldly butterfly, leaping toward the sun to prance in the air. (Not for nothing was Miltown nicknamed “executive Excedrin.”) To everyone else, it was a WTF? of epic proportion. Miltown’s maker had paid Dali a $35,000 fee to design the exhibit, part of the display’s overall $100,000 budget. Yet the expense caused the company no anxiety whatsoever: In the drug’s first two years, Miltown accounted for 30 percent of all prescriptions, with Americans filling thirty-six million prescriptions for the trailblazing tranquilizer.
Competing with Dali and his chrysalis at the same AMA meeting was Will Burtin and his blood cell. Built by The Upjohn Co., this model of a human red blood cell revolutionized exhibit building. Before the replica, which was designed by infographics pioneer Burtin, no 3-D representation of a red blood cell existed. One million times larger than the actual microorganism, the twenty-four-by-twelve-foot structure was made of 8,000 plastic parts, cost $75,000, and held up to forty attendees. Like Dali’s exhibit, Burtin’s was a walk-through model. Made mostly of plastic, it contained a mile of electric wiring and an assortment of throbbing lights that effected the magic of a living organism. After the AMA conference, Burtin built a scaled-down version that was easier to ship. The new six-foot-tall model traveled to San Francisco, New York, Chicago, and London. (It also resided briefly in the Burtin-designed pharmacy in Disney World.) An estimated ten million people toured the outsized simulated cell.
Burtin’s legacy is as collectively neglected as Dali’s is universally recognized. Fleeing Nazi Germany for New York when he was pressured to become the Propaganda Ministry’s design director, Burtin forayed into product packaging, trade shows, and world’s fairs for American companies such as Upjohn, Eastman Kodak Co., International Business Machines Corp., and Union Carbide Corp. His Eastman Kodak pavilion at the 1964 New York World’s Fair was a visual knockout, an eighty-foot-tall structure ringed by five ginormous photo enlargements, each running about 2,000-square-feet, which resembled glossy transparencies. During the fair’s two-year-long run, the company reported the highest sales of camera equipment since its founding in 1888.
©Ezra Stoller/Esto
Burtin followed the “glowing and mysterious” blood cell with an equally immense brain. Completed in 1960 for Upjohn, the thirteen-by-thirty-foot exhibit was a lattice of aluminum discs with 20,000 red, green, and white flashlight bulbs and forty miles of wire. A medley of projected images and light sequences demonstrated the way impulses weave their way through nerve canals, with the crimson lights representing visual stimuli; green, auditory; and white, muscle activity. The brain exhibit journeyed to Italy and England, as well as to the 1960 American Medical Association meeting in Miami, drawing thousands of visitors. Burtin’s “exhibit sculptures” included later ones on genes, metabolisms, and uranium atoms, and achieved an almost imperceptible immortality influencing future exhibitions from Smithsonian Institution exhibits to Amgen Inc.’s booth at the 2006 Society of Nephrology convention. Designed by Mitchell Mauk and Larry Raines, the exhibit depicted Amgen’s colossal advances in drugs that combat chronic kidney disease by jam-packing it with 3-D models of cells and receptors related to CKD that were as much as 10,000 times the size of a real cell. Made of fiberglass and iridescent plastics, they hung from the ceiling and walls like ornaments from the Blob’s Christmas tree. The sheer wattage of Burton’s brilliance and the extent of his influence in exhibiting suggest it wasn’t hyperbole when it was said of him that he was to graphic design what Albert Einstein was to physics.