There have been cool school posters from Sweden on Cabinet of Infographic Curiosities before about economics, now we start the year 2026 with a series of school boards about alcohol consumption, this time from Finland.
I don’t know what comes to mind when people think of Finland, but here in Hungary, apart from our linguistic affinity (eleven hal úszkál a víz alatt=elävä kala uiskentelee veden alla), the most common cliché about our brothers and sisters is that alcoholism is at least as serious a problem for them as it is for us. Here, even on the first working day of January, people are still recovering from their New Year’s Eve parties. Perhaps the situation is similar in Finland.
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The series was created by Akseli (Axel) Eino Einola (1898–1948) in 1928. Einola was a relatively well-known graphic artist and illustrator who wrote numerous children’s books and created educational print series. The seven boards was commissioned by the Finnish Teachers’ Temperance Association, which has a rather amusing name. The publisher was the Osakeyhtiö (Oy) Valistus company. The series presented here is owned by the Helsinki City Museum.
The series covers various aspects of alcohol consumption, such as mortality, heredity, crime, accidents, its impact on schoolwork, or my favourite: shooting accuracy! From a design perspective, I would highlight two things. One is the colours. These pastel blues, greens, oranges, and browns are lovely. The other is the figurative representations. Although such representations of people were not unusual, unlike Isotype, these figures somewhat reflect the age composition and diversity of society.
Unfortunately, the digitized boards are not of uniform quality.
No 1. Alcohol consumption in different countries. The upper part shows annual alcohol consumption in different countries per person on average, in litres, 1922–1925. The lower part shows annual alcohol consumption in Finland at different times per person on average, in litres. Image courtesy of Helsinki City Museum.
No 2. Intoxicating drinks and schoolwork. The board tries to show the correlation between alcohol and schoolwork based on Dutch data of 1790 pupils. The columns’ names from the left to right: well progressing pupils, moderately progressing, poorly progressing. The rows’ names are from up to down: never consumes, occasionally consumes, consumes on daily base. Image courtesy of Helsinki City Museum
No 3. Intoxicating drinks and shoot accuracy. The board’s graphic illustrates the experiment of a Swedish lieutenant, Bengt Boy on the effects of alcohol on shooting accuracy. Six soldiers carried out a series of test shootings over the course of several days; the interval between shots was 30 seconds.In the first and third groups, the tests were conducted without intoxicating drinks. In the second group, each shooter drank a small amount of cognac 20–30 minutes before the exercises began.In the first test group, the number of perfect misses was 7, in the second 27, and in the third 5. Image courtesy of Helsinki City Museum.
No. 4. Intoxicating beverages and accidents. Based on Danish data an average of 64 people died from accidents annually in the years 1911–1916, 33 people in 1917, and 27 people in 1918. Image courtesy of Helsinki City Museum.
No. 5. Intoxicating beverages and mortality. In Great Britain's Temperance and General Insurance Institution, there has been, since the year 1841, a separate department for teetotal (sober) and non-teetotal policyholders. The company's experience so far regarding the average life expectancy of the sober versus the non-sober is that, out of 10 insured persons who took out insurance at age 30, 6 people were alive at age 70 in the teetotal department on average, and 4 people in the non-teetotal department on average. Image courtesy of Helsinki City Museum.
No. 6. Alcohol and heredity. Finnish Professor Laitinen has studied the children of 5,845 families to determine what kind of hereditary effects the use of intoxicating beverages has in our country. At the time the study was conducted, for every 100 children, 13 died in teetotal families, 23 among the children of moderate drinkers, and 32 among the children of drunkards. First row: Teetotal families. Second row: Moderate drinkers. Third row: Drunkard families.
No. 7. Intoxicating drinks and criminality. According to an official study conducted in Finland in 1898, regarding male prisoners detained in Finnish penitentiaries that year: 62.9% had committed their crime in an intoxicated state and 5.3% while hungover; thus a total of 68.2% of the entire number of said prisoners. 31.8% had committed their crime while sober, or less than one-third of all male penitentiary prisoners. Therefore, every five men who committed their crime sober corresponded to ten who committed their crime while intoxicated or hungover. Image courtesy of Helsinki City Museum
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