Laughing at the Weather? The Serious World of Weather Cartoons
Roger Turner, a Ph.D. candidate in History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania, discusses his experiences as part of the inaugural poster session at the 2008 HSS Meeting.
Roger Turner with his poster at the 2008 HSS Meeting. (Photo courtesy Sage Ross)
My first thought on reading the call for papers was not noble. I’m on the job market, and a poster seemed a reliable route onto the program. After all, how many historians make posters? What began as a resume builder ended up as an exploration of popular print culture in America and its intersection with weather forecasting; from Wonder Woman and her lasso of truth (created by the inventor of the lie detector) to cartooning meteorologists.
But first, the medium. I hadn’t touched static visual media since a bitter experience in a high school language arts class. I love museums, though, so I took wall exhibits as my model. Posters are good for a visual argument, allowing audiences to linger over several images and to compare them. Standing next to a poster also lets you have a longer chat with an audience, but the poster’s text and images must form a complete story in the absence of an external presenter. Unlike a verbal presentation, narrative is hard to control; hardly anybody starts reading at the top left.
Unfortunately, my dissertation project is long on narrative and short on images. A history of aeronautical meteorology in the first half of the 20th century, my research tracks a group of Scandinavian and American meteorologists through their writings in operations manuals, research journals, memos, and textbooks. Out of all these, one drawing from a 1943 textbook stuck out. It shows the hand of reason pulling back a curtain marked "Weather Superstitions and Fallacies,î" to reveal a winding path posted with signs like "Bacon, Galileo, Torricelli, Boyle," and "Air Mass Analysis," and leading to a gleaming peak labeled "Weather Control." Sort of a cartoon history of meteorology.
Inspired by that cartoon, I looked more closely at materials from World War II. Over the last five years, I’ve collected several hundred items of weather-related ephemera and books, mostly on eBay. Going through my shelves, I noticed the many cartoons in texts designed to train soldiers and pilots. Simple line art, often featuring recurring comic characters, these images reinforced key messages with a funny and memorable picture. Up until my poster research, I had ignored the silly cartoons that now proved the most obvious and interesting feature of these manuals.
A 1940 aviation insurance booklet used cartoon strategies like recurring characters, personified clouds, and humorous scenes to make safety messages more memorable for pilots.
Figuring out why the military went mad for cartoons whisked me into a far richer story than I expected, one that included Ken Alder’s article on the lie detector, which mentioned that one of the machine’s inventors also created Wonder Woman and her lasso of truth. ìOf course!î I thought. Comic books were the favorite reading material for young men in the 1940s. A bit of time in the library revealed that comic books – and, even more so, comic strips in newspapers and advertising – had made comic art the most widely shared aspect of American print culture by the 1930s. A day or two later, while searching for secondary literature on comic art in weather training, I found references to meteorologists who drew cartoons for television weather reports. After a semester’s worth of research, I’ve discovered that the TV weather report was invented by discharged military meteorologists during the late 1940s, who combined the narrative form of the pre-flight briefing with comic art to produce a popular and broadly accessible form of public science. But comic art’s enduring valences as entertainment and low culture had an unexpected consequence on meteorology. Some TV stations required trained forecasters to take cartooning classes, while many others hired entertainers rather than meteorologists. Meteorologists have struggled to control TV weather ever since.
Constructing the poster was fun but challenging. I used PowerPoint, which can create posters up to 36î x 56î. That gave space for 18 images and about 500 words of captions and header text, though somewhat bigger text would have been better; 24pt is probably a minimum. I laid out the argument in three frames, echoing the form of a comic strip. I used solid black text over a very light, cloudy blue sky background, and arranged color as well as black and white images. Printing on glossy paper cost about $100 at Kinkos, and took overnight. Have them print you a proof first, and scrutinize it!
Presenting the poster was a wonderful experience. For nearly four hours, people paused to look and ask questions. Viewers seemed more engaged than during paper presentations, and I could readily assess which aspects interested people.
Best of all, the poster improved my scholarship while sparking research that also engaged the wider public. My university’s publicity group featured weather cartoons in a Web-slide show, which attracted a profile in the university newspaper and a freelance writer who produced a forthcoming piece for Air & Space magazine. Finally, creating this poster reinforced the power of images to communicate ideas, a power up till now I’d not considered in my dissertation.