The first globe–a spherical representation of our planet Earth–dates back to the Age of Discovery. Or 1492, to be more precise, when Martin Behaim and painter Georg Glockendon created the “Nürnberg Terrestrial Globe,” otherwise known as the “Erdapfel.” It was made by hand. And that tradition continued straight through the 20th century, until machines eventually took over.
Above, you can watch the tail end of a 500-year tradition. Somewhere in North London, in 1955, “a woman takes one of the moulds from a shelf and takes it over to a workbench. She fixes it to a device which holds it steady whilst still allowing it to spin.” “Another girl,” notes British Pathe, “is sticking red strips onto a larger sphere.” After that, “coloured printed sections showing the map of the world are cut to shape then pasted onto the surface of the globes.” Through that “skilled operation,” the London-based firm produced some 60,000 globes each year.
Here, you can also watch another globe-making mini-documentary, this one in black & white, from 1949. It gives you a glimpse of a process that takes 15 hours, from start to finish.
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Buckminster Fuller’s Map of the World: The Innovation that Revolutionized Map Design (1943)
Last week we brought you news of a world map purportedly more accurate than any to date, designed by Japanese architect and artist Hajime Narukawa. The map, called the AuthaGraph, updates a centuries-old method of turning the globe into a flat surface by first converting it to a cylinder. Winner of Japan’s Good Design Grand Award, it serves as both a brilliant design solution and an update to our outmoded conceptions of world geography.
But as some readers have pointed out, the AuthaGraph also seems to draw quite heavily on an earlier map made by one of the most visionary of theorists and designers, Buckminster Fuller, who in 1943 applied his Dymaxion trademark to the map you see above, which will likely remind you of his most recognizable invention, the Geodesic Dome, “house of the future.”
Whether Narukawa has acknowledged Fuller as an inspiration I cannot say. In any case, 73 years before the AuthaGraph, the Dymaxion Map achieved a similar feat, with similar motivations. As the Buckminster Fuller Institute (BFI) points out, “The Fuller Projection Map is [or was] the only flat map of the entire surface of the Earth which reveals our planet as one island in the ocean, without any visually obvious distortion of the relative shapes and sizes of the land areas, and without splitting any continents.”
Fuller published his map in Life magazine, as a corrective, he said, “for the layman, engrossed in belated, war-taught lessons in geography…. The Dymaxion World map is a means by which he can see the whole world fairly at once.” Fuller, notes Kelsey Campell-Dollaghan at Gizmodo, “intended the Dymaxion World map to serve as a tool for communication and collaboration between nations.”
Fuller believed, writes BFI, that “given a way to visualize the whole planet with greater accuracy, we humans will be better equipped to address challenges as we face our common future aboard Spaceship Earth.” Was he naïve or ahead of his time?
We may have had a good laugh at a recent replica of Fuller’s nearly undriveable, “scary as hell,” 1930 Dymaxion Car, one of his first inventions. Many of Fuller’s contemporaries also found his work bizarre and impractical. Elizabeth Kolbert at The New Yorker sums up the reception he often received for his “schemes,” which “had the hallucinatory quality associated with science fiction (or mental hospitals).” The commentary seems unfair.
Fuller’s influence on architecture, design, and systems theory has been broad and deep, though many of his designs only resonated long after their debut. He thought of himself as an “anticipatory design scientist,” rather than an inventor, and remarked, “if you want to teach people a new way of thinking, don’t bother trying to teach them. Instead, give them a tool, the use of which will lead to new ways of thinking.” In this sense, we must agree that the Dymaxion map was an unqualified success as an inspiration for innovative map design.
In addition to its possibly indirect influence on the AuthaGraph, Fuller’s map has many prominent imitators and sparked “a revolution in mapping,” writes Campbell-Dollaghan. She points us to, among others, the Cryosphere, further up, a Fuller map “arranged based on ice, snow, glaciers, permafrost and ice sheets”; to Dubai-based Emirates airline’s map showing flight routes; and to the “Googlespiel,” an interactive Dymaxion map built by Rehabstudio for Google Developer Day, 2011.
And, just above, we see the Dymaxion Woodocean World map by Nicole Santucci, winner of 2013’s DYMAX REDUX, an “open call to create a new and inspiring interpretation of Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion Map.” You’ll find a handful of other unique submissions at BFI, including the runner-up, Clouds Dymaxion Map, below, by Anne-Gaelle Amiot, an “absolutely beautiful hand-drawn depiction of a reality that is almost always edited from our maps: cloud patterns circling above Earth.”
You’ve adjusted to the strangeness of names like Ascalaphus and Phidippus. You’ve more or less figured out who’s on which side in the ancient war between Greece and Troy. But as literary epics will do—from the ancient Greeks and Indians to the 19th century Russians—Homer’s Iliad also presents you with several logistical puzzles you must either ignore or spend countless hours trying to solve: you are given the names of major and minor characters’ hometowns, ranging all over the Adriatic, Ionian, Cretan, and Aegean Seas. Doubtless you have no idea where most of these places were.
Again and again, place names occur in rapid succession, and you’re told not only who hails from where, but who commands and conquers which city. Just a smattering of examples from Book II (in Samuel Butler’s translation):
Ulysses led the brave Cephallenians, who held Ithaca, Neritum with its forests, Crocylea, rugged Aegilips, Samos and Zacynthus, with the mainland also that was over against the islands.
Thoas, son of Andraemon, commanded the Aetolians, who dwelt in Pleuron, Olenus, Pylene, Chalcis by the sea, and rocky Calydon,
And those that held Pherae by the Boebean lake, with Boebe, Glaphyrae, and the populous city of Iolcus
“Huh,” you say, “Okay, Homer, I’ll take your word for it.” Questions of historicity aside, we can at least say that the hundreds of cities and towns mentioned in this culturally formative text did exist, or continue to do so, though it’s debatable, as Jason Kottke writes, whether “that level of mobility was accurate for the time [somewhere in the 11th or 12th century BC] or if Homer simply populated his poem with folks from all over Greece as a way of making listeners from many areas feel connected to the story.”
In any case, you need not despair of ever making sense of Homer’s bewildering geographical lists. The map above (click here to see it in a larger format) handily illustrates the world of the Iliad, showing the places of origins of a few dozen characters, with Greeks in green and Trojans in yellow. Kottke notes in an addendum to his post that “not every character is represented… (particularly the women) and… some of the locations and hometowns are incorrect.” We would welcome corrections—as would Wikipedia—if an enterprising classics scholar has the time and energy to devote to such an effort.
But for the lay reader of Homer’s epic, the map more than suffices as helpful visual context for a very complicated narrative. One defining feature of a war epic well-told, most critics would say, is that the human drama does not get lost in the scale and scope of the action. More than any other form, the epic illustrates what Tolstoy described in War and Peace as the “historical sense” that our conflicts are “bound up with the whole course of history and preordained from all eternity.” But against this kind of determinism, the great poets particularize, making their characters seem not like props in a cosmic drama but like actual people from actual places on earth. Seeing the Iliad mapped above reinforces our sense of the Greek epics as genuine—if fantastical—accounts of meaningful human action in the world.
You can find free versions of the Iliad and the Odyssey in our collection of Free eBooks and Free Audio Books.
Though he’s hardly a household name like Kandinsky or Klee, Hungarian painter and photographer László Moholy-Nagy was just as influential as those members of Walter Gropius’ Bauhaus during the 1920s. As a teacher and one of the collective’s “leading figures,” Fiona MacCarthy argues, he may have indeed been, “the most inventive and engaging of all the Bauhaus artists.” Where all of the school’s members embraced, and sometimes critiqued, emerging technologies, materials, and modes of production, perhaps none did so with such conviction as Moholy-Nagy.
“Everyone is equal before the machine,” he once wrote, “I can use it; so can you. It can crush me; the same can happen to you.” His cool “grasp of new technologies,” writes MacCarthy, “was prophetic.… Entranced by the mechanized production of artworks,” he ridiculed “the artists’ traditional stance as individual creator.” Many modern artists shunned advertising work, but in Moholy-Nagy’s case, the transition seems perfectly natural and consistent with his theory. He also needed the money. Having fled the Nazis and settled in London in 1935, the artist found himself, notes Hyperallergic, “looking to pick up some work to support his displaced life.”
He found it in 1936 through the UK’s Imperial Airways, who commissioned him to apply “his constructivist style” to a map (view it in a larger format here) intended to reassure nervous potential customers of the safety of air travel, a still new and frightening prospect for most travelers. He did so in a way that “makes air travel seem as approachable as stepping on the subway,” with his officiously color-coded “Map of Empire & European Air Routes.” The map, according to Rumsey, “draws on the pioneering information design work of Harry Beck and his London subway maps,” made in 1933 and “originally considered too radical.”
In addition to this businesslike presentation of orderly and predictable flight patterns, Moholy-Nagy created a brochure for the British airline (see the cover above and more pageshere). Incorporating the so-called “Speedbird symbol,” these designs, writes Paul Jarvis, made “the point that Imperial spanned the empire and in time would span the world.” Not everyone was impressed. British transit executive Frank Pick, who presided over the visual identity of the London Underground, called Mohagy-Nagy “a gentleman with a modernistic tendency… of a surrealistic type, and I am not at all clear why we should fall for this.” His comments underscore MacCarthy’s argument that the Hungarian artist’s reputation suffered in England because of nationalist hostilities.
Mohagy-Nagy’s art “is international,” said Pick, “or at least continental. Let us leave the continent to pursue their own tricks.” The statement now seems a bit uncanny, though of course Pick could have had nothing like Brexit in mind. As far as Imperial Airlines was concerned, Mohagy-Nagy’s “continental” avant-gardism was exactly what the company needed to entice wary, yet adventurous passengers. You can download free high resolution scans of the map, or buy a print, at the David Rumsey Map Collection (an original vintage poster will cost you between four and six thousand dollars). And see some of Mohagy-Nagy’s less commercial work at this downloadable collection of Bauhaus books and journals.
Satellite-connected devices do all the hard work of navigation for us: plan journeys, plot distances, tell us where we are and where we’re going. The age of the highly skilled cartographer may be coming to an end. But in the past few hundred years—since European states began carving the world between them—the winners of colonial contests, World War battles, and Cold War skirmishes were often those who had the best maps. In addition to their indispensable role in seafaring and battle strategy, “good maps,” writes Danny Lewis at Smithsonian, have been “an integral part of the tradecraft of espionage.”
The CIA will tell you as much… or they will now, at least, since they’ve declassified decades of once-secret maps from the days when they “relied on geographers and cartographers for planning and executing operations around the world” rather than on “digital mapping technologies and satellite images.”
Now celebrating its 75th anniversary, the CIA’s Cartography Center boasts of “a long, proud history of service to the Intelligence Community,” at the Agency’s friendly website; “Since 1941, the Cartography Center maps have told the stories of post-WWII reconstruction, the Suez crisis, the Cuban Missile crisis, the Falklands War, and many other important events in history.”
Whatever noble or nefarious roles the Agency may have played in these and hundreds of other events, we can now see–thanks to this new online gallery at Flickr–what presidents, Directors, and field agents saw when they planned their actions, beginning with the country’s first “non-departmental intelligence organization,” the COI (Office of the Coordinator of Information). Once the U.S. entered WWII, it became the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). The Cartography Center’s first chief, Arthur Robinson, was only 26 and a graduate student in geography when COI director William Donovan recruited him to lead the organization. The office rapidly expanded during the war, and by 1943, “geographers and cartographers amassed what would be the largest collection of maps in the world.”
In the early forties, “map layers were drafted by hand using pen and ink on translucent acetate sheets mounted on large Strathmore boards.” These drafts were typically four times larger than the printed maps themselves, one of which you can see at the top of the post, “The Russian Front in Review.” In the fifties, “improved efficiency in map compilation and construction” produced visually striking documents like that further up from 1955, “USSR: Regional Distribution of Gross National Product.” Not a map, but what we would call an infographic, this image shows how the Cartography Center performed services far in excess of the usual map app—visualizing threats to the U.S. from Cuban surface-to-air missile sites in 1962 (above) and threats to the African elephant population from poachers in 2013 (below). Further down, you can see a 2003 map of Baghdad, with the ominously non-threatening note printed at the top and right, “This map is NOT to be used for TARGETING.”
These maps and many more can be found at the CIA Cartography Flickr account, which has a category for each decade since the 1940s. Each map is downloadable in low to high resolution scans. In addition, one category, “Cartography Tools,” features high-quality photography of vintage draughtsman’s instruments, all of them, like the German-made ink pens further down, symbols of the painstaking handicraft mapmaking once required. While we can probably draw any number of political lessons or historical theses from a deep analysis of this deep state archive, what it seems to ask of us first and foremost is that we consider cartography as not only a useful discipline but as a fine art.
As the Cartography Center’s first director put it, “a map should be aesthetically pleasing, thought-provoking, and communicative.” Given these standards we might see how current technology, for all its tremendous ease of use and undeniable utility, might improve by looking to maps of the past. Visit the CIA’s flickr gallery here.
Jorge Luis Borges once wrote of an empire wherein “the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province.” Still unsatisfied, “the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it.” But posterity, when they lost their ancestors’ obsession for cartography, judged “that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters.” With that enormous map, in all its singular accuracy, cast out, smaller, imperfect ones presumably won the day again.
With that well-known story “On Exactitude in Science,” Borges illustrated the idea that all maps are wrong by imagining the preposterousness of a truly correct one. The Vox video “Why All World Maps Are Wrong” covers some of the same territory, as it were, first illustrating that idea by slitting open an inflatable globe and trying, futilely, to get the resulting plastic mess to lie flat.
“That right there is the eternal dilemma of mapmakers,” says the host in voiceover as the struggle continues onscreen. “The surface of a sphere cannot be represented as a plane without some form of distortion.” As a result, all of humanity’s paper maps of the world–which in the task of turning the surface of a sphere into a flat plane need to use a technique called “projection”–distort geographical reality by definition.
The Mercator projection has, since its invention by sixteenth-century Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator, produced the most widely-seen world maps. (If you grew up in America, you almost certainly spent a lot of time staring at Mercator maps in the classroom.) But we hardly live under the limitations of his day, nor those of the 1940s when Borges imagined his land-sized map. In our 21st century, the satellite-based Global Positioning System has “wiped out the need for paper maps as a means of navigating both the sea and the sky,” but even so, “most web mapping tools, like Google Maps, use the Mercator” due to its “ability to preserve shape and angles,” which “makes close-up views of cities more accurate.”
On the scale of a City, in more Borgesian words — and probably on the scale of a Province and even the Empire — Mercator projection still works just fine. “But the fact remains that there’s no right projection. Cartographers and mathematicians have created a huge library of available projections, each with a new perspective on the planet, and each useful for a different task.” You can compare and contrast a few of them for yourself here, or take a closer look of some of the Mercator projection’s size distortions (making Greenland, for example, look as big as the whole of Africa) here. These challenges and others have kept the Disciplines of Geography, unlike in Borges’ world, busy even today.
I cannot, and do not wish to, imagine the U.S. without its National Park system. The sale and/or despoliation of this more than 80 million acres of mountain, forest, stream, ocean, geyser, cavern, canyon, and every other natural formation North America contains would diminish the country immeasurably. “National parks,” wrote novelist Wallace Stegner, “are the best idea we ever had. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst.”
Stegner’s quote—which gave Ken Burns’ National Parks documentary its subtitle–can sound overoptimistic when we study the parks’ history. Though not officially designated until the 20th century, the idea stretches back to 1851, when a battalion, intent on finding and destroying an Indian village, also found Yosemite. Named for what the soldiers thought was the tribe they killed and burned, the word actually translates as “they are killers.”
Westward expansion and the annexation of Hawaii have left us many sobering stories like that of Yosemite’s “discovery.” And during their development in the early- to mid-20th century, the parks often required the mass displacement of people, many of whom had lived on the land for decades—or centuries. But despite the bloody history, the creation of these sanctuaries has preserved much of the country’s embarrassment of natural beauty and irreplaceable biodiversity for a century now. (The National Park Service celebrated its 100th anniversary just this past August.)
The National Park Service and its allies have acted as bulwarks against privateers who would turn places like Yosemite into prohibitively expensive resorts, and perhaps fell the ancient Redwood National forests or blast away the Smokey Mountains. Instead, the parks remain “absolutely democratic,” open to all Americans and international visitors, the pride of conservationists, scientists, hikers, bird watchers, and nature-lovers of all kinds. Given the sprawling, idealistic, and violent history of the National Parks, it may be fair to say that these natural preserves reflect the country at both its worst and its best. And in that sense, they are indeed “absolutely American.”
There are many ways to experience the National Parks without long car rides or flights across the country or the world, though none of them can match the awe and grandeur of the real thing. Ansel Adams photographed the parks religiously, and in 1941 received a commission from the National Parks Service (NPS) to create a photo mural. World War II scrapped the project, but the 200 plus photos he took are all freely available online. The NPS has also made available 100,000 photographs, blueprints, and drawings of the National Parks throughout their history with its Open Parks Network.
We can add to these already incredible free resources the online project National Parks Maps. Begun in 2013 by Colorado park ranger Matt Holly, the site currently hosts “1,198 free high-resolution national park maps to view, save, and download.” Holly created the site for purely practical reasons. “I’ve always found it time-consuming to visit each park’s web page and use an embedded map viewer or muddle through the website to find a nice printable map,” he writes. “So I’ve done the dirty work for you.”
That said, we find this collection is filled with aesthetic pleasures, and no small number of geographical and historical curiosities. At the top see a 3D map of Hawaii’s Haleakala National Park, with a “stunning overview of Maui.” Below it, see a map of “the range of the Coast Redwood, stretching from southern Oregon to south of Big Sur.” (Redwood National and State Parks appear as a tiny area on the left, just below the Oregon state border.) Further down is a bright blue aerial map of Florida’s Dry Tortugas National Park, and below it, a map of the historical Wilderness Road through the Cumberland Gap, the “path of the famous road used by settlers to reach Kentucky.” Plus, then the Southern Rim of the Grand Canyon.
Further up, see a map of Death Valley, and just above, a floor plan of the U.S. Penitentiary on Alcatraz Island. This tiny sampling of the more than one-thousand maps at Holly’s National Parks Maps site shows just some of the natural (and man-made) wonders the National Parks Service stewards. For more, visit the site, where you can browse by state or alphabetically by park. Holly has also uploaded brochures and trail and lodging maps, and included links to other resources as well as gifts and prints. The site more than accomplishes its practical purpose of centralizing all the cartographic info travelers might need. But it also makes an implicit case for the National Parks by showing us how well they have kept intact the country’s defining features, which will, one hopes, still be here long after we are gone.
If you’re an Open Culture old timer, you know the work of EmperorTigerstar–a Youtuber who specializes (to quote myself) “in documenting the unfolding of world historical events by stitching together hundreds of maps into timelapse films”. We’ve previously featured his “map animations” of the U.S. Civil War (1861–1865), World War I(1914–1918), and World War II (1939–1945) and also the History of Rome. This week, the map animator released The History of Europe: Every Year. In ten minutes, he takes us from The Minoan civilization that arose on the Greek island of Crete (3650 to 1400 BC), down to our modern times. About 5,000 years of history gets covered before you can boil a pot of pasta. Enjoy.
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