Transcript 05_Victorian_Era.ppt

Breaking the grid
The Industrial Revolution
• The major technological, socioeconomic and cultural change in the late
18th and early 19th century that began in Britain and spread throughout
the world.
• An economy based on manual labour was replaced by one dominated by
industry and the manufacture of machinery.
• It began with the mechanisation of the textile industries and the
development of iron-making techniques, and trade expansion was
enabled by the introduction of canals, improved roads and then railways.
• The introduction of steam power (fuelled primarily by coal) and powered
machinery (mainly in textile manufacturing) underpinned the dramatic
increases in production capacity.
• The development of all-metal machine tools in the first two decades of
the 19th century facilitated the manufacture of more production
machines for manufacturing in other industries.
What started it all: James Watt's steam engine
1765
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newcomen_steam_engine
Thomas Newcomen: 1712
• The effects spread throughout Western Europe and North America during
the 19th century, eventually affecting most of the world.
• The impact of this change on society was enormous and is often
compared to the Neolithic revolution, when various human subgroups
embraced agriculture and in the process, forswore the nomadic lifestyle.
• The first Industrial Revolution merged into the Second Industrial
Revolution around 1850, when technological and economic progress
gained momentum with the development of steam-powered ships,
railways, and later in the nineteenth century with the internal combustion
engine and electrical power generation.
• At the turn of the century, innovator Henry Ford, father of the assembly
line, stated, "There is but one rule for the industrialist, and that is: Make
the highest quality goods possible at the lowest cost possible, paying the
highest wages possible."
Breaking the grid
• Printing techniques using movable type had restricted graphic design to
an inflexible grid.
• Anything that was to be mass printed in great volume needed to adhere
to a system whereby type was set in consecutive rows of parallel lines.
• Illustrations, maps and the like were hand drawn and engraved, only
allowing for limited, costly editions due to the wearage of the engraving
plates.
• Lithography– Set the type free from the bondage of
its compositor.
• The term "lithography" dates back to the end of the
18th century, when Alois Senefelder invented the
technique of printing with stone plates.
• This novel method - originally intended for the
reproduction of music notation - quickly spread
throughout the art world.
• Munich became the center of this printing
technique, which was to be come extraordinarily
important for 19th century art and for advertising of
the age as well.
Lithographic stones, the lithography press and portrait of
Senefelder
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Lithography refers to a printing process that uses chemical processes to create an
image. For instance, the positive part of an image would be a hydrophobic
chemical, while the negative image would be water. Thus, when the plate is
introduced to a compatible ink and water mixture, the ink will adhere to the
positive image and the water will clean the negative image. This allows for a
relatively flat print plate which allows for much longer runs than the older physical
methods of imaging (e.g., embossing or engraving).
Within a few years of its invention, the lithographic process was used to create
multi-color printed images that held all manner of cropped, embedded and
bordered images as well as free running type, a process known by the middle of
the 19th century as Chromolithography. A separate stone was used for each
colour, and a print went through the press separately for each stone. The main
challenge was of course to keep the images aligned (in register). This method lent
itself to images consisting of large areas of flat colour, and led to the
characteristic poster designs of this period. Many fine works of
chromolithographic printing were produced in America and Europe.
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Photography
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Yet another invention which greatly affected visual communication procedures
was the invention of photography.
This is the process of making pictures by means of the action of light. Light
patterns reflected or emitted from objects are recorded onto a sensitive medium
or storage chip through a timed exposure.
The process is done through mechanical, chemical or digital devices known as
cameras.
The first photograph was an image produced in 1826 by the French inventor
Nicéphore Niépce on a polished pewter plate with a camera. The image required
an eight-hour exposure in bright sunshine.
In partnership, Niépce and Louis Daguerre refined the existing process. In 1839
Daguerre announced that he had invented a process called the Daguerreotype.
William Fox Talbot had earlier discovered another means to fix a silver process
image but had kept it secret. After reading about Daguerre's invention Talbot
refined his process, so that it might be fast enough to take photographs of
people.
Victorian family portraits
• The Daguerreotype proved popular in responding to the demand for
portraiture emerging from the middle classes during the Industrial
Revolution.
• This demand, that could not be met in volume and in cost by oil painting,
added to the push for the development of photography.
• Daguerreotypes, while beautiful, were fragile and difficult to copy. A
single photograph taken in a portrait studio could cost USD $1,000 in
2006 dollars.
• In 1884 George Eastman developed film, to replace the photographic
plate so that a photographer no longer needed to carry boxes of plates
and toxic chemicals around. In July of 1888 Eastman's Kodak camera went
on the market with the slogan "You press the button, we do the rest".
• Now anyone could take a photograph and leave the complex parts of the
process to others, and photography became available for the massmarket in 1901 with the introduction of Kodak Brownie.
1819-1901
The Victorian Era
The Victorian era of Great Britain marked the height of the
British industrial revolution and the apex of the British
Empire.
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Victorian morality is a distillation of the moral views of
people living at the time of Queen Victoria (reigned
1837-1901) in particular, and to the moral climate of
Great Britain throughout the 19th century in general.
For most, the Victorian period is still a byword for
sexual repression. Victorian prudery sometimes went
so far as to deem it improper to say "leg" in mixed
company; instead, the preferred euphemism “limb”
was used.
Verbal or written communication of emotion or sexual
feelings was also often proscribed so people instead
used the language of flowers. However they also
wrote explicit erotica, perhaps the most famous being
the racy tell-all My Secret Life by Henry Spencer
Ashbee, who wrote under the pseudonym Walter.
Victorian greeting cards
Victorian die cuts. These were the counterparts of today's stickers, with which people
would ornament their diaries and letters. The effects of mass production and hence
the neccessity to appeal to a far less sophisticated customer base can clearly be felt
in the design of both these and the postcards above.