David Rumsey

The Speed of the Earth returns to Burning Man 2026. Across a mile of open playa, bursts of light reveal something we can never feel: the Earth spinning beneath us at 1,156 feet per second.

Created by Kevin Kelly, David Rumsey, Dean Putney, Seth Roche, and Sonny Roche, this year’s installation lifts the lights 10 feet above the playa and adds glowing trails to each burst—transforming the invisible speed of our spinning planet into a streak of light racing across the desert.

A remarkable Soviet atlas of the 1930s turns statistics into bold visual storytelling—using pictograms, isotypes, repetition, scale, color, and photomontage to make industrial, agricultural, and military data instantly understandable. #DataVisualization #SovietDesign #Isotype davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/s…

A milestone for davidrumsey.com: over 150,000 historical maps and related images are now freely available online. After 26 years, the site has welcomed 50+ million visitors, delivered 20+ million free downloads, and seen 250+ million map views. Thank you to everyone who has explored with us. Next stop: 200,000 maps online by 2031. #Maps #History #Cartography #OpenAccess

Imagine Wikipedia—without the internet. The Bouasse-Lebel Encyclopedia transformed the knowledge of the late 19th century into hundreds of beautifully illustrated educational wall charts covering anatomy, astronomy, engineering, agriculture, natural history, geometry, and more. Explore this remarkable visual encyclopedia and discover the world as Victorians learned it. #History #Maps #Science #Art #Education All 180 charts hi res davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/s…

The title page and complete hand-colored plates from The Heavens Illustrated (London, 1844), a beautifully produced Victorian introduction to astronomy. Featuring 17 hand-colored illustrations of eclipses, the zodiac, planets, the Sun and Moon, and astronomical instruments, the work combined scientific education with striking visual design. Published at the dawn of Britain’s color-printing revolution, it reflects the era’s growing ambition to make knowledge both accessible and beautiful. davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/s…