Andrew Mangravite

Art and advertising have always been bed fellows. Advertising art must be quickly comprehensible to its audience and make an immediate impact, even when the object being advertised makes its own bang.

Some of the greatest technological achievements from the 18th through the 20th century required the public to look up—from the first balloon flights of the Montgolfier brothers to the birth of the ocean-crossing behemoths built by Ferdinand, Graf von Zeppelin.

Archives place history at our fingertips, but sometimes that history needs a little interpretation. Take the records of early pharmaceutical company William H. Rorer, which point to a lesson in pharmacy and good government.

For more than 30 years chemist James Curtis Booth successfully oversaw quality and minimized waste at the U.S. Mint. Then three bars of silver bullion disappeared.

Wilhelm Ostwald, winner of the 1909 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on catalysis and an accomplished “Sunday painter,” conducted extensive research into the nature of color. His resulting aesthetic provided a stark contrast to the emerging artistic movements of the early 20th century.