Wednesday, April 18, 2007

I happened that I had to make a report about the history of microscopes. So, the fact that in 19th century people couldn't take photos with microscopes, because they simply didn't have that feature. But the interesting fact in order to help people imagine things and objects that can't be seen artists drew pictures and made lithographs of them. The point of that was to communicate with people and let them know, for example, about germs (which they can't really see), to tell what a big threat they are for the society. So, artists presented them in forms of very ugly and dirty bugs. It seemed very interesting to me. Of course nowadays, we can easily look under a microscope; there is no need to draw colored threatening cartoon like pictures for us. I don't really know how many people at the end oft he 19th century perceived newspaper and magazine ad illustrations as true depictions of the microscopic world, but surely the less cartoonish illustrations had an effect on them.