Fanciful Engineering and Frank Tinsley

The art of Frank Tinsley and Sci-Fact-Fic

Some time ago I participated at a panel on spaceships for artists at Arisia (see old post). One of the odd things I was surprised at was the lack of familiarity in the panel and others with Frank Tinsley, an illustrator who did quite a bit of work for pre-war pulps and Mechanix Illustrated magazine after the war. While many SF illustrators were famous for the SF pulp cover work they did, Mr. Tinsley did no particular work for the many science fiction pulps or paperbacks during his career that I can find. On the other hand, he did quite a bit of work in an area which doesn't really have an adequate description. I suppose it is an area normally referred to as futurism, but in some ways I  think the terms science factional fiction or science fiction engineering is closer, or even Futurama. I don't mean the TV show, but rather the hugely popular GM pavilion at the 1939 World's Fair designed by Norman Bel Geddes.

"To New Horizons" the GM industrial film to introduce their Futurama Exhibit at the New York's World Fair of 1939

The reason I believe in the difference is perhaps because futurism does cover a lot of work that is actually rigorously thought out and modeled with reasonably hard data regarding technological and social trends. The type of work I would consider under sci-fact-fi or S/F/E  covers the type of documentary work  that talks about subjects with an air of hard technical background or specificity that is really at best an excessively overly optimistic view of technological and social trends and at worst pure hyperbole.

In spite of that last sentence, I do believe there is a great deal of value to this type of work. Whilst on the one hand, it is not really useful as any sort of foundation for creating a real functional piece of technology or social engineering, I do suppose it has in the past served as much an inspiration for young future engineers as the appearance of technology in science fiction romances. In fact, such articles were perhaps even more inspiring since they were normally presented as a non-fiction subject sometimes in quite serious publications such as Life or National Geographic.

Life magazine speculative article illustrated by Robert McCall about the future of space travel that accompanied the "First Man in Space" issue April 21, 1961 (find original at Google Books)

Frank Tinsley

Frank Tinsley was born in 1899 in Manhattan. Turn of the century Manhattan was perhaps the living embodiment of a future city in its day. Already having some of the tallest buildings in the world, it was a hub of continent wide transportation arteries. It contained the largest and highest bridges in the world, an elevated and subterranean suburban transport system, and collected a truly polyglot community perhaps unequaled anywhere at the time. Perhaps more importantly he was born in someways along with aviation and it was the aviation pulps where he did a lot of covers.

Variety of covers and art work Frank Tinsley did for the Air Trails/Bill Barns pulp magazine

As dated as these covers may seem to us, they are drawn with an air of passion about flying machines, colorful and dynamic. I dare say much more exiting than even what comes out of the marketing department of Boeing/McD-D and Lockheed-Martin these days. Many of the aircraft shown in these covers and stories represented slight variations on existing aircraft or protototypes.Some of Bill Barnes aircraft were truly inventive designs with some rarely implemented features on real aircraft such as retractable floats and sky hooks for areal dockings.

Some of Tinsley's fanciful futuristic designs that accompanied his articles for Mechanix Illustrated. From top right: A suburban saucer, a nuclear airship, a walking jeep or mechanical mule, and an airborne hover police car.

After the war, Frank Tinsley also began to write articles of speculative engineering projects, S/F/E involving many different forms of transportation: space, terrestrial, and maritime. He also illustrated a memorable series of advertising for American Bosch Arma in the 50s. These ads featured various nuclear and solar powered spaceships and lunar bases with descriptive copy of the futuristic settings, although the company was not in the business of building or designing spacefaring hardware at the time (just their electronics). I still have fond memories of the ads having come across them in old Scientific American issues from the 50s.

Two of the American Bosch Arma Adverts

As prolific as he appears to be in this area of illustration, I can't find any mention of him connected to any actual science fiction magazines or covers at this time. Given the nature of his articles, I can only imagine that he must have been a fan

More on this

While his images are out there, and not always credited, there is very little about Frank Tinsley himself. A brief bio as available at The Field Guide to Wild American Pulp Artists: Frank Tinsley. Also some more information here at the Lambiek Comiclopedia. The Flikr user X-ray Delta One (Call sign for the "Discovery" if you didn't know) has a collection of his images including some of the text of some of his articles. The articles for Mechanix Illustrated are available at the Mechanix Illustrated blog (I've put the link off the search term here to hopefully make it faster to find). A gallery of the ABA ads can be found at Vintage Ads on LiveJournal.