Hasta La Ideas

Shortly after midnight, I opened up a new tab in Chrome and started punching in a search term when I noticed what I unmistakably recognized as a faux early-to-mid 20th century sketch of a streamlined locomotive. My untrained eye guessed Loewy, and one click later, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that it’s his 120th birthday today.

L: PRR K4S; R: Loewy with the S1

First of all, I’m glad that Google (at some point over the past few months, IIRC) decided to include the whimsical art logos above the search field in new tabs: Since they’ve enabled searching through the navigation bar, I rarely if ever go to google.com any more—I’ve probably missed out on a couple years’ worth of Google Doodles before they saw fit to add it to ‘blank’ tabs in Chrome. Upon clicking on the image, I was also interested to see that the Google News results for “Raymond Loewy” listed a few hits down, included several stories about the Google Doodle itself. The Guardian suggests that it resembles the S1 steam locomotive, while the Independent elaborates:

Among his main clients was the Pennsylvania Railroad, for whom he designed passenger locomotives, developing a distinctive shroud design for K4s Pacific #3768 to haul his newly redesigned 1938 Broadway Limited… Today’s doodle shows a locomotive bearing a resemblance to the K4s Pacific #3768 shroud design.

K4S

S1

Insofar as Google has taken some creative liberties with the streamline form factor, they’re both right: The Pennsylvania Railroad commissioned S1 to be a next-generation K4S—which was exhibited with a “one-off streamlined casing” as the World’s Fair in 1939—but, as “the longest and heaviest rigid frame reciprocating steam locomotive ever built,” the S1 never took off. (A quick Google search for further info turned up a few discursive notes on both engines here and the image below.)

Via

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