Ads From a Simpler LIFE

"It’s only 31 miles from New York City and
is a very pleasant drive."

This gracious invitation from Con Edison to come and view the Indian Point nuclear facility, was one of two ads for nuke plants that ran in the June 16, 1967 issue of Life.

Westinghouse, who built the reactor for Connecticut Yankee, the plant at Haddam Neck, also advertised in that issue. CY was shut permanently in 1996 and has since been decommissioned.

"The plant will be a welcome neighbor—as clean and quiet
as any good neighbor could be."

"… made with Monsanto ingredients that just refuse
to go wrong—no matter who stirs them up."

A Monsanto ad in the same issue.

"We may be the only phone company in town, but we
try not to act like it."

This AT&T ad encouraged home shopping and reassured us as to just how benevolent a monopoly it was.

“Born loser” is a term we don’t hear much these days. Sure, we have high unemployment, but we’ve got high self-esteem to match. We’re all winners these days, as our kids’ shelves of meaningless trophies, prove. The only losers we tolerate now are weight losers.


One of four cigarette ads in the issue.


Remember Polaroid? This simple ad really looked great running inside the front cover.

Plume and Doom

With the hypothesizing, calculating, and scenario analyzing, regarding the radioactive emissions from Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power plant, I was reminded of a very unusual infographic that ran 65 years ago in Fortune.

In 1946, precisionist painter Ralston Crawford, was dispatched by the magazine to witness the nuclear testing at Bikini Atoll. Among the 124 members of the press to attend, Crawford was the only artist. His observations and reactions resulted in a six-page piece that included photographs, paintings and an infographic.

Although known as a painter, Crawford was an experienced information designer. During WWII, he served in the Army Air Corps Visual Presentation Unit as chief of its Weather Division. There he created maps for Army pilots, and developed a pictorial language of weather symbols to translate meteorological data used in military operations into a more comprehensible format.

The last spread of the Bikini article is about the migration of radioactivity. This is the one Crawford felt was essential, since what it showed was precisely what was not directly observable at Bikini. On the left side of the spread is a photo of the explosion’s cloud column. It is annotated to show how the mass of radioactivity was dispersed by prevailing winds at three altitudes. On the facing page there is a map showing where the plume would have traveled had the atomic bomb been detonated over New York City on that same day. You can see its shape and direction based on wind conditions in the northeast that day compared to the inset map showing how it actually traveled at Bikini.

Below are small versions or the spreads as they appeared, but see and read the whole piece at Full Table.




Sources: Fortune; Ralston Crawford, Barbara Haskell (Whitney Museum catalog)