Boeke,+Kees

=Boeke, Kees=

toc Read here pertinent facts about someone whose work is critical to a proper comprehension of scale.

=Biography=

Kees Boeke ( -1966) was trained as a civil engineer and later became a teacher. He started the internationally famous Werkplaats Children's Community, a school in the Netherlands, and founded the Dutch section of the New Education Fellowship. As a Dutch schoolmaster he conceived the idea of a book as a vivid way of imparting a "sense of scale." He had developed it for years, perfecting the drawings and adding more and more information to them. Their plotting had been a towering job, for he was determined that every object shown should be in the correct relationship to every other as to position, size, and distance. For example, having chosen noon of a certain day in a certain year as the time when all the 40 pictures are conceived to have been made, he placed the planets, the sun, and even Halley's Comet in precisely the locations they would have had at that instant. In the reduced-scale pictures, to give another example, viruses are shown in their actual shapes, and in the correct sizes in relation to bacilli and other organisms; the wave lengths of radio waves and X-rays are drawn to scale, and we learn how minute by comparison are the gamma rays of the nuclear scientist. Dr. Arthur H. Compton, Nobel prize winner in physics, wrote the introduction.

=Bibliography=

Boeke 1957. Cosmic view;: The universe in 40 jumps, by Kees Boeke, 48 pages, J. Day.