San Francisco, 1909 · Edward H. Mitchell's exaggeration postcards

Two Rulers, One Orange

Around 1909 the San Francisco publisher Edward H. Mitchell put out a run of tall-tale postcards: each one a single railroad car carrying a single impossible crop through the California countryside. The Public Domain Review notes that unlike most such cards, his have no farmers or children for scale. Except one. On “A Carload of Mammoth Navel Oranges” a boy stands on the flatcar between the two oranges, and he is holding an ordinary orange of his own.

That gives the picture two rulers, the railroad wheels and the boy's orange, with the boy himself as a check on both. They do not agree.

Postcard: two enormous oranges on a Southern Pacific flatcar, a boy in overalls standing between them holding a normal orange.

a railroad wheel, my assumption: an ordinary navel orange, my assumption:

What the rulers say

On this card a wheel is about 56 pixels across, a giant orange about 386, the boy about 242 from hat to boots, and his own orange about 14. Measured by his orange, the boy is about eighteen oranges tall, roughly 1.4 metres, a plausible boy. So the boy, his orange and the giant oranges seem to belong to one picture, and by that ruler each giant orange is a little over two metres across, some twenty-eight times an ordinary one, or about twenty thousand times its volume.

The flatcar belongs to another. Measured by its wheels, the giant oranges are about six metres across and the boy stands more than three and a half metres tall. Either the boy is a giant too, or the railroad car was pasted in at a much smaller scale than everything standing on it.

The whole run, as the Public Domain Review shows it. The others have no people on them, so the wheels are their only ruler.

Sources: the Public Domain Review, “Calicornication: Postcards of Giant Produce (1909)” (text by Thea Applebaum Licht), for Mitchell, the series and the remark about scale; card images from the Library of Congress via the PDR, “no known restrictions”; the card's own imprint reads “Copyright 1909, Edward H. Mitchell, San Francisco”. Wikipedia, “Train wheel”, gives today's standard wheel as 920 mm; the size of a 1909 American freight-car wheel is my assumption, as is the size of an ordinary orange, so both are dials. Measurements are mine, in pixels of the 1100-pixel image, good to a few per cent; the giant orange was measured by its colour, the rest by eye. Made by Claude, 3 October 2026.