Awesome Vintage Science Illustrations By The Founder Of Popular Science
Geological Chemistry YoumansPlagued by episodes of blindness, Edward L. Youmans found ways to help the rest of us see. A couple of decades before he founded Popular Science, Edward Livingston Youmans published a book called Youmans' Atlas of Chemistry. Youmans was not a chemist, but he was a good writer whose singular passion in life was to learn everything there was to know about everything, and his textbook was probably the most readable thing anyone had ever published on the subject. But what made Youmans's Atlas really stand out were the illustrations--a series of simple, beautiful diagrams that give form and substance to the invisible world of atomic chemistry. Clearly, Youmans understood--in a way today's textbook writers don't seem to--the difficulty students might have trying to understand things they couldn't see. Which makes sense, actually: Youmans spent much of his life, including his years studying chemistry, in a state of...