The great era of mass card issues in the first half of the twentieth century coincided with rapid advances in science, engineering, medicine and technology. The achievements of past scientists and inventors was frequently celebrated and the self-confidence that mankind was living through an age of huge progress exuded through many sets which brought a broad spectrum of achievements of historic importance into the hands of the card collector.
Eminent scientists and engineers have appeared in general sets of prominent personalities. For example, Ogden’s Leaders of Men series of 1924 featured Charles Darwin, Isaac Newton, Thomas Edison, Galileo and James Watt among the 50 people honoured. Darwin’s theory of evolution was covered in an informative set of 25 cards issued by Lambert and Butler in 1928 titled Common Fallacies. The title of the card quotes, ‘According to Darwin we are descended from Monkeys,’ before going on to state:
Darwin, the great naturalist, in his epoch-making Origin of Species (1859) first set forth the evidences of the evolution of living creatures; and in the Descent of Man (1871), showed that man is the co-descendent with other species of some ancient, lower and extinct form. He warned his readers against this very fallacy, for he wrote We must not fall into the error of supposing that the early pro-genitor of the whole Simian (i.e. ape-like) stock, including man, was identical with, or even closely resembled, any existing ape or monkey.
Perhaps the most visionary scientist and inventor of all time was the Italian Leonardo da Vinci. His work also encompassed art, sculpture, architecture, music and cartography, and he has been celebrated across many card issues. In 1921, Liebig issued a set of 6 lavishly illustrated cards giving an overview of his achievements, while in 1962 the same firm put out Leonardo da Vinci, Inventor. The set shows his attempts to design a human-powered propeller for a ship, a bridge, human flying wings and a large water wheel. This lovely set can be purchased for less than £5.
Although many of da Vinci’s designs never progressed into inventions during his lifetime, Wills’ 1915 series of Famous Inventions focussed on 50 items which had changed the world, including Edison’s first phonograph, the Spectroscope, X-ray, the Grand Piano and a Rock Drill. One invention that was taught about in school history lessons to many generations of children was James Watt’s Steam Engine. The card tells us of the significance of Watt’s development:
About 1712 Thomas Newcomen, a Dartmouth blacksmith, made an engine to pump water out of coal-mines, and in 1765 James Watt invented a much stronger and superior engine for the same purpose. Richard Trevithick in 1804 made the first steam-propelled carriage to travel along the road faster than a horse-drawn vehicle, and the first passenger railway was opened from Stockton to Darlington in 1825, George Stephenson being the engineer.
A very good example of this fascinating and educative collection might cost around £50.
Hill’s 1929 Scientific Inventions and Discoveries covered a similar area, albeit in a slightly different format, with an issue of 35 large cards. The same company’s Inventors and their Inventions continued the theme of the 1934 set, with 20 cards depicting a portrait of the inventor in the top half of the card with a picture of their invention underneath. They include people from across the ages who are now household names, including Marconi, Morse, Mme. Curie, Galileo and Daguerre. Two contrasting inventions, one which saved countless lives of coal miners, and one which cost countless lives of soldiers, were included. About Sir Humphry Davy’s safety lamp we learn:
Sir Humphry Davy was born at Penzance in 1778. He devoted his early life to Chemical and Philosophical Researches, and his book on these subjects gained him the appointment of Lecturer to the Royal Institution.
He investigated Fire-damp, producing in 1816 the Miner’s Safety Lamp which bears his name, though the discovery has been claimed for George Stephenson, who arrived simultaneously, and probably independently, at the same idea. Sir Humphry died in 1829.
The Maxim machine gun was to become feared for its ferocity, bringing industrial strength to the battlefield and changing the nature of warfare forever. The card tells us of its inventor:
Sir Hiram Maxim was born in Maine, U.S.A., in 1840. He has been prominently associated with the development of electricity, both as an illuminant and a motive power; but, perhaps, he is best known as the inventor of the automatic machine gun which bears his name; he is also the inventor of the ‘pom-pom’ and of a smokeless powder closely resembling cordite. He has devoted much attention to experiments with flying machines, and has made successful trials with some of his own inventions.
Wills’ Engineering Wonders 1927 took a worldwide look at some of the feats of civil engineering that had occurred in the preceding decades, including a lock on the Panama Canal, a giant excavator from the USA, and the Great Assouan Dam in Egypt. Closer to home, we have the Great Dam at Lake Vyrnwy in Wales, about which we learn:
In 1881 work was commenced upon the scheme for supplying Liverpool with water by impounding the Vyrnwy, a tributary of the Severn, in Montgomeryshire. The Great Dam, which is 1,172 feet in length, and contains 260,000 cub. yds. of masonry, is built on the crest of a natural dam formed long ago by glacial action. A fine carriage-road runs along the top of the arches, through nineteen of which the surplus water pours down the face of the dam into the lower valley. At high-water level the reservoir contains about 12,000 million gals. An aqueduct 68½ miles long conducts the water to the Prescott reservoir near Liverpool.
This attractive and varied set can be bought for around £30.
The Story of Sand was an engineering-focussed set issued by Ogden in 1934. We are taken through the formation and extraction of the material and shown some of its many uses in industry and leisure. The workings of the Electric Grab Crane are explained:
Sand is obtained from the sea-bed by means of suction dredgers. The vessel brings its load to the quay-side, where great electric grab-cranes discharge the cargo into lorries at the rate of about 70 or 80 tons per hour. The principal types of sand obtained from the sea in this manner are fine brown sand, which is used for asphalt-making, plaster work, tee-boxes on golf courses, the manufacture of coloured glass bottles, etc., and coarser grade of sand used for ferro-concrete, general building purposes, surface dressing for roads, and for dressing lawns.
Player featured the development of the technology of timekeeping in their Clocks Old and New series of 20 cards in 1928. The clocks range from card 1, showing an Egyptian Water Clock from about 1400 BC through to card 25 which depicted the clocks which were currently keeping Greenwich Mean Time at the Royal Observatory in south-east London. The ancient Egyptian timepiece had been found in a temple at Karnak in 1901 and was used for indicating the passage of the hour-intervals of the night. How it worked was this:
Inside the vase are twelve scales, the division of which are marked by dots, each scale being divided into ten parts and corresponding to the month of which the name is inscribed on the rim of the vase above the scale. The vase was filled with water which escaped slowly from an orifice near the base so that the water level fell by one interval of the scale for each hour-interval of the night.
The card collector keen to learn how accurately time was measured in the 1920s would have been reassured by the detailed information about the Modern Clocks at the Greenwich Observatory:
The clock on the left is bolted to a wall 4ft. thick, in a cellar. It is the Synchronome Free Pendulum, which keeps time to within one hundredth of a second, and helps to determine Greenwich Mean Time. It has no wheels, its works being in the Slave clock (right) which is in electric connection with it and performs its ‘escapement’ function. Thus we are reminded that the mechanism is a means to an end, and that if the forces of nature can be harnessed without its use, greater accuracy results. We began with Clepsydra, Sundials and Hour-Glasses, which had no wheels. Having traced clocks through the mechanical era, we come to this latest production of the clockmaker’s art, which reverts to ancient simplicity and attains a degree of precision hitherto undreamt of.
For those who were keen on the practicalities of scientific experimentation, Churchman’s Interesting Experiments was issued in 1929, a set of 25 cards. The structure of the atom, which had been the subject of intense research during the preceding three decades, was explained in clear format:
A number of equally magnetised needles are mounted vertically, as shown in the picture; with similar poles uppermost, and floated on corks in a basin of water. If two of these needles are placed in the water, they will immediately repel each other but if the opposite pole of a magnet be held above the centre of the basin the needles are attracted to it. As other needles are added interesting formations result, as shown in the picture. These afford a good illustration of the arrangement of the numerous Electrons in the Atom.
Churchman’s Modern Wonders was issued in 1938 as a set of 48 medium cards which can now be bought relatively cheaply. They include such feats of engineering as a 30-ton Treasury Door, an Automatic Telephone Exchange and a Super Calculating Machine. One huge set devoted to contemporary advances was issued by A. & M. Wix, a firm with headquarters in London and Johannesburg, thus meaning the text on the back of the card was printed in English and Afrikaans. Consisting of 250 cards, the Age of Power and Wonder series was issued between 1935 and 1938. It examined existing inventions and predicted further developments in science and technology. An examination of the scope of the cards can reveal much about how western civilisation viewed its recent achievements, and the huge potential for further progress that existed in the then foreseeable future, but also that the power that had been harnessed could have terrible outcomes for mankind. Therefore we have celebrations of advances in physics, industry and medicine, and aspirations for the future.
One invention that was in its early stages of development, but which was to become the dominant medium of the second half of the century, changing the way people consumed news, education and entertainment, and how humans related to each other, was the television. Its inventor, John Logie Baird, was featured on card number 16, which tells us:
Inventor of Television, John Logie Baird has worked for many years to perfect his apparatus. He was the first man to demonstrate television – in 1925. Now he has achieved television in full colours, not yet as good as colour films, but well on the way. At the transmitting end the pictures are separated into the primary colours and then reassembled at the receiving end.
The copywriter not only recognised the progress that Baird had made with television during the preceding decade, but speculated with a great degree of accuracy on its future development. Card 13 informs us:
Linked with other modern marvels, television will open new worlds to everybody. Men in a bathysphere at the sea-bed may transmit to the home set or to the cinema scenes taking place at the bottom of the ocean. The reporter of the future will be the television operator who broadcasts news to the world while it is taking place.
The second part of the prediction was seen in its positive form, with the mass live broadcast of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953, and in its ugly form when film of the suffering of the Vietnamese people was beamed into millions of living rooms in America in the 1960s.
During the twentieth century, much energy was devoted to the quest for humans to break free of the constraints of planet earth and reach out into space. In 1903 Liebig issued a set of 6 cards titled Constellations each featuring a different stellar arrangement. Player also examined this aspect in 1916 with the release of the 25-card Those Pearls of Heaven series which featured various planets and constellations. Liebig’s 1921 set Astronomers II highlighted the work of people through time who had sought to chart the heavens. In Wills’ Romance of the Heavens of 1928 the artist speculated on what the surface of many of the Solar System’s plants might look like. Mitchell’s The World of Tomorrow set of 50 cards brought out in 1936 went a stage further by speculating on how science and technology might improve the lives of future generations. There was a suggestion of a Fog Eliminator, a Birdman, an Ocean Airport and a Tidal Power Generator. Also included was a prediction of a launch of a vessel into outer space.
Following the war, Brooke Bond’s Out Into Space of 1958 had colourful pictures of planetary phenomena as well as the symbols of the Zodiac. Beano Gum reflected on the advances already made towards the Conquest of Space by 1956, via balloons, airships and guided missiles.
Post-Second World War trade cards have also sought to keep pace with the continuing interest of collectors for science-related sets. These include Tonibell’s Inventions that Changed the World (1962), Brooke Bond’s Inventors and Inventions (1975) and Clover Dairy’s Science in the 20th Century (1965). All these sets can be bought for a modest price. At a slightly higher price, there is Sunblest Tea’s Inventions and Discoveries, with two sets of cards of 25, with both sets costing £15 each.
As the world celebrated the first moon landing by Apollo 11 in 1969, Brooke Bond issued The Race into Space in 1971. The set of 50 cards was designed to go into a special presentation album, the foreword for which was written by the renowned astronomer Patrick Moore. Just as the cigarette cards of the first half of the twentieth century had documented the great advances of that era, Moore’s piece conveys the sense of standing on the threshold of a new epoch in human history. He commented that:
We are living in the Space Age. Science fiction has become science fact, and great advances are being made very year. The Moon has been reached; our rockets have been sent out to the planets Venus and Mars, and within the next decade or two we should be able to receive television pictures from the very boundaries of the Solar System.
Space research has become a part of our everyday lives, and we can watch its progress. By now there can be few people who have not seen star-like points crawling across the sky – the artificial satellites, circling the world and sending back their information. And it is more than likely that some of those who are starting to collect this series of cards will actually go to the moon – perhaps even beyond. It is a staggering thought, but it is by no means unlikely.
I commend this series of cards; it is factual, comprehensive and well-produced. If you collect the whole series, you will learn much from the pictures and texts. After all, we have entered a new age. Earthly isolationism ended at that moment on 21 July 1969 when Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin stepped out onto the Sea of Tranquillity.
The completed album itself was densely packed with detailed information on American, Soviet and European space exploration. Card number 7 showed the Soviet rocket Vostok on its launchpad. This was the multi-stage rocket that lifted Yuri Gagarin into orbit on 12 April 1961, making him the first human to journey into outer space. Its total thrust, we are informed, was 1,323,000 lbs.
Medical discoveries gathered enormous pace during the era of the cigarette and trade card. Many of these, such as the X-ray machine and the Iron Lung, were featured on The Age of Power and Wonder series mentioned above. Medicine also appears in cards featured in other series. For example, Wills produced four series of Do You Know cards between 1922 and 1933, the second of which included a description of the workings of an X-ray machine:
Towards the end of the 19th century Sir W. Crookes devised the ‘Crookes Tube,’ a glass vessel exhausted of air, and somewhat like an electric bulb lamp, but with two platinum wires sealed into its walls. When a current from an induction coil is passed through the tube, a beautiful phosphorescent light is seen, and invisible radiations (‘X-rays’) are given out which possess the remarkable power of penetrating substances opaque to ordinary light. On the left is shown an X-ray tube in use, and on the right is a Sciagram, or ‘photograph’ of the hand, taken after a few seconds exposure to the rays.
Although it seems retrospectively ironic that a tobacco company should celebrate advances made in the treatment of cancer, this was the case with Wix’s Age of Power and Wonder series card on the War on Cancer. Showing a patient being treated by radioactive waves, the card explains:
When scientists first began to create synthetic radio-activity, to make substitutes for radium, by bombarding certain atoms with millions of electron-volts, someone suggested ‘Why make radium to cure cancer? Use the bombarding atoms direct’. This suggestion was adopted by the use of very high voltage X-rays. Many successful experiments have been made.
Post-war medical advances are also covered on trade card issues. The work of the great Alexander Fleming is featured on card number 33 of Brooke Bond’s Famous People, 1869-1969 series. This work proved crucial to Allied success in the Second World War, as penicillin was extensively used during the D-Day landings to prevent the many serious wounds inflicted on allied troops turning gangrenous, thus accommodating for the often significant time lapse between wounding and treatment by the army’s medical services. We are informed that:
Alexander Fleming, son of a Scottish farmer, qualified as a doctor and was Professor of Bacteriology at St. Mary’s Hospital, London, from 1924-1948. Fleming longed to find a way of destroying bacteria in the human body without harming the body’s cells. Although he discovered penicillium notatum, a mould that killed bacteria, in 1929, it was ten years before a team led by Australian Howard Florey produced penicillin in a form in which it could be used and stored. Fleming and Florey shared the 1945 Nobel Prize for Medicine. Both were knighted for this discovery which revolutionised the treatment of disease.
Again, it is only possible to provide the briefest overview of the range and depth of cards relating to science and technology. The collector interested in this area will find themselves entering a world of delight by beginning to amass a collection on this theme.