Ocean-Liner Cutaways, Diagrams, and Composites: Technical Illustration as Mass Aesthetic in Popular Mechanics and The Illustrated London News

This article analyzes the visual rhetoric of ocean-liner illustrations that appeared in mass periodicals in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Cutaways, diagrams, and composite images of ocean liners created an innovative visual style that fused data structures with pop aesthetics, combining pedagogy of media literacy with the pleasures of voyeurism and vicarious voyaging. Illustrations of the Queen Mary and the sinking of the Titanic are emphasized to show how mass periodicals constructed imagined, impossible scenes of ocean travel that humanized abstract, large-scale technological changes and crises of modernity, thereby rendering them comprehensible to a mass readership.