Edgar Franklin Wittmack

Edgar Franklin Wittmack (1894–1956) was an illustrator and cover artist for many of the most popular magazines of the 1920s and 1930s.^[1][2] His covers, just as the artwork of his contemporary, Norman Rockwell, were usually created as oil paintings. Where Rockwell specialized in the humorous aspects of small-town life, Wittmack dealt mainly with male-oriented interests. He often painted heroic or action-type figures for the Saturday Evening Post,^[1][2] American Boy,^[1][2] Outdoor Life^[3] as well as the "quality" pulp magazines such as Adventure ^[4] and Short Stories. ^[5]

Wittmack illustrated a 1916 Scientific American cover with a Zeppelin spy basket.

However, he is probably most known for the covers he created for Popular Science. His "retro-futuristic" style was used during the depression to artistically convert the ideas of inventive Americans into unique visual expressions of potential reality.