A Century Of Popular Science

How has Popular Science changed since it was first published in the late 1800s? It got a whole lot more colourful, for one thing. Here’s 125 years of the magazine’s history captured in one massive 74 million square pixel image.

The 11550 x 6480 pixel image, created by William Huber, a student of media theorist Lev Manovich, shows one Popular Science spread from every 5 years since its inception, starting with a dense, text-heavy layout in 1882 and adding illustrations, colour, and eventually photographs along the way. See if your browser can handle the full size image here.

Manovich’s students did a similar mapping for the cover of Time magazine from 1923 to 2009. [Flickr via Infosthetics]