A Daily History of Holes, Dots, Lines, Science, History, Math, Physics, Art, the Unintentional Absurd, Architecture, Maps, Data Visualization, Blank and Missing Things, and so on. |1.6 million words, 7500 images, 4.9 million hits| Press & appearances in The Times, Le Figaro, Mensa, The Economist, The Guardian, Discovery News, Slate, Le Monde, Sci American Blogs, Le Pont, and many other places… 5000+ total posts since 2008.

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Category: Maps, Cartography, History of Mapmaking

“Children Who Work on the Nation’s Crops” (1942)

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post Overall Post 5128

This is a substantial indictment and attack on the loose laws (where they actually existed) regarding child labor in the United States, specifically regarding kids working in the fields. If you scroll down you can see what laws were applicable to what states, and there were plenty of states that had virtually no regulations on children laboring in the fields, being part of a migratory family. I’ve reproduced here some of the most significant bits from the pamphlet as well as all of teh photos–the photo images aren’t exactly Jacob Riis, but they’re getting there. In any event Ms. Zimand was making a very strong case and presenting an embarrassing expose on the use of child labor in the U.S. just at the beginning of the U.S. overt military involvement in WWII.

[Source: ZIMAND, Gertrude Folks. Children who work on the nation’s crops. New York City, National Child Labor Committee [1942] [National Child Labor Committee. Publication no. 384., 9″x 6″, 19pp. Photo illustrations.]

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History of Memory — Lines, History of — Maps, Cartography, History of Mapmaking
Another Episode in the History of Blank and Empty Things

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post (A small but useful part of the History of Blank and Empty Things series)

This wide expanse of white and unmodified map space exhibits the more-or-less total absence of daily (or weekly) newspapers in the West and Far West of the U.S. in 1880. The measure of the gradient colors depict the “newspaper per capita of population, the “absence of color indicate a population of less than two people to a square mile, being practically an absence of settlement”. making up about a third of the country.

Source: History and Present Condition of the Newspaper and Periodical of the United States, by S.N.D. North, U.S. Tenth Census Report (1880), printed 1884.

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Blank and Empty Things; A History of — Maps, Cartography, History of Mapmaking
Delightful Maps of the IRT, NYC, 1923.

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I’ve just found this delightful little publication beautifully extolling the possible advertising advantages of the Interborough Subway and Elevated Lines of New York City, Artemas Ward’s New York’s Rapid Transit Traffic in the Graphic, from 1923. It really does present the numbers and highlights them with some unusual and bright maps of the subway system. This was the IRT (the Interborough Rapid Transit system), which was a private concern that operated from 1903 until 1940, when it was purchased by NYC. This subway system in general was, well, entirely different from the one that I traveled 1968-1974 or so, back when you could barely see through the car windows because they were so heavily coated with graffiti…Anyway, I’ve reproduced most of it below as there are no copies of the pamphlet in any library according to WorldCat. The design of the first one–with the giant “Broadway”–is terrific.

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Information, Quantitative Display of — Maps, Cartography, History of Mapmaking — Technology, History of
A Tragic Map of an Empty Place (1825)

JF Ptak Science Books Post 2893

In the history of maps of blank, empty, and missing places this map¹, published in 1825, is one of the hollowest, and saddest of 19th c US-centric image: it is a heartbreaking map of an empty, abandoned village of peacefully-living runaway slaves in Jamaica, in about 1825.

The name of the town, extraordinarily, was “We No Sen, You No Come”. It meant, basically, that the slaves living there would not leave their town, wouldn’t seek anything from the outside, would not interact, would not interfere; in return, they didn’t want anyone visiting, coming to them. interfering in any way; just wanted to be left alone, to live. And from the account of this supportive, understanding and sympathetic publication, that is exactly what these people had done for eleven years.

[Image source–please see Notes below]

But then something happened. The owners of the enormous estate wanted the “banditi runaways” gone. The slaves evidently had 200 acres under domestication, hidden in the far reaches of an enormous 100,000 acre estate. The “hunting party” left heavily armed, accompanied by 250 troops, as well as “confidential and baggage negroes”. (The term “baggage negroes”, as impossible as it might seem today, was a well-worn, heavily used term through the 18th and mid-19th centuries.) They approached the small town and encountered a very slight resistance, something like a guard, and killed them. Retreating somewhat after the initial attack, the scouting party returned, and then found the village completely empty. (Some reports say that there was more limited fighting, with casualties on both sides; some say that there were more slaves killed.) After whatever happened happened, though, the return to the little village found it abandoned, with everything still in place. The members of the village had “disappeared”. Or at least I hope that they did, and didn’t get “disappeared”, men, women and children all, as in the famous Floridian “Negro Fort” case and Andy Jackson. Perhaps these people were fortunate to actually escape.

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Blank and Empty Things; A History of — Maps, Cartography, History of Mapmaking
Things-out-of-Place Department: Old Maps in Space

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This is just a short, funny little bit here–I can’t remember noticing an antiquarian map being used as part of the design or decoration based on extraterrestrial objects. I guess that’s why this image struck me so quickly as being unusual…I just can’t recall another image like it. I mean, this isn’t exactly a towering visual achievement, and in many ways it is ordinary, except that (I think) it isn’t. Anyway, I share it with you now (the source being the Scientific American, July 1957):

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Maps, Cartography, History of Mapmaking
A Sociological Map Made for and by Hoboes (1870)

JF Ptak Science Books (An earlier post, expanded)

This is the frontispiece to the delightful work with the luscious title of The Slang Dictionary; or, the Vulgar Words, Street Phrases and Fast Expression of High and Low Society… printed in London by John Camden Hotten, in 1870. It is a hobo or “cadger” (“a mean or vulgar fellow who would rather live on other people than work for himself”) map (or the map of “a tribe of vagabonds”) of Maidstone, in Kent, drawn by a “screever” (a sidewalk chalk artist who normally would draw religious images for money), and showing the various chalked and etched signs that the hoboes (“and other mendicant marks”) would leave for one another, being a key to the town, for what was practicable, safe, dangerous, and the like.

Recorded antiquarian hobo and tramp symbols like these are really quite rare, given their ephemeral nature to begin with; of course the need to record these obscure signs by polite society was not on a high order. There are many indications that signs such as these existed, but not many illustrations. For example in the book The Triumph of Wit; or, Ingenuity Display’d in its Perfection, edited by John Shirley. (1724), as well as works by Holyland and Borrow there is a description of English gypsies and their travels, and a short description of their use of boughs and sticks, set out for each other, so that a duplication of effort by different bands or families would not occur.

(The figure of the woman, wonderfully named “3/4 Sarah”, probably connects this Sarah to a sort of popular dance.)

Hotten also published the following interesting and title-bending work in 1874: THE ORIGINAL LISTS OF PERSONS OF QUALITY; EMIGRANTS; RELIGIOUS EXILES; POLITICAL REBELS; SERVING MEN SOLD FOR A TERM OF YEARS; APPRENTICES; CHILDREN STOLEN; MAIDES PRESSED; AND OTHERS WHO WENT FROM GREAT BRITAIN TO THE AMERICAN PLANTATIONS 1600-1700, WITH THEIR AGES, THE LOCALITIES WHERE THEY FORMERLY LIVED IN THE MOTHER COUNTRY, THE NAMES OF THE SHIPS IN WHICH THEY EMBARKED, AND OTHER INTERESTING PARTICULARS.

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Maps, Cartography, History of Mapmaking — Maps/Diagrams of Imagination & Ideas — Social History
A Chinese Kingdom in North America (1753)
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Here’s a good example of the mapping of a non-existent entity: the Kingdom of Fusang, or the Chinese/Fusang people, located in British Columbia/Washington state, appearing in the considerable Philippe Buache’s map, Carte des Nouvelles Decouvertes…(1753). It is a wonderful map that also has a lot of suggested possibilities of realities in the not-much explored Pacific Northwest of North America. What we see appearing above the huge landmass of “Californie” (mostly the entire west coast of the present-day U.S.) is the island-like “Fou-sang des Chinois”. This area stretches from about the 47th to the 59th parallels, and is contiguous to another hypothesized entity, the “Mer de l’Ouest”, which is an enormous body of water about the size of Hudson Bay. This is also connected to another very large body of water, the “Grande Eau”, which in turn has connections leading to the Atlantic ocean, thus forming the much-hoped-for and dreamed-of Northwest Passage.
- Click to clarify and enlarge
Source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusang#/media/File:Buache1753Map.jpg

I’m not faulting M. Buache whatsoever in telling this little tale of prospective Geography–he produced (for his time) an excellent map of not very well understood and distant places.
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Maps, Cartography, History of Mapmaking — Maps/Diagrams of Imagination & Ideas
The First Meteorological Map (Created by Edmund Halley) 1686/7

JF Ptak Science Books Post 2831 History of Lines series

Fresh on the heals of a post a few days ago on Athanasius Kircher’s great map on ocean currents is this famous 1687 map by Edmund Halley¹–it is recognized as the first meteorological map ever printed, and depicts the trade winds:

This is the French translation of Halley’s “An Historical Account of the Trade Winds, and Monsoons, Observable in the Seas between and near the Tropicks, with an Attempt to Assign the Phisical Cause of the Said Wind,” that appeared several months earlier in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (1686, in issue no. 183).

Here is a summary of the map from the Princeton University site dedicated to thematic maps:

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Information, Quantitative Display of — Maps, Cartography, History of Mapmaking
The Gulf Stream in 1678
JF Ptak Science Books Post 2831

This is one of the earliest depictions of what we know today as the Gulf Stream, and it appears one among many wonders in Fr. Athanasius Kircher’s Mundus Subterraneus (1678). The map appears about a century before the first map to truly distinguish the Gulf Stream (the B. Franklin/Folger map of 1768-1785) and shows the remarkable activity that must have come with the acquisition of the data necessary to show on even this popular map. Given that the data was necessarily spotty at this early period the Kircher effort was largely theoretical (and for what it was worth he likened the currents to something similar to blood moving though the body, which at least put to use the work of William Harvey). (Eberhard Happel is on a similar wavelength as Kircher with the currents map, and published his map a few years later, though he was mainly a science popularizer who “relied” heavily upon the Kircher map and was nowhere near to being Kircher’s intellectual rival–his map is still interesting given its very heavy lining and beauty.)
- Tabula Fluxus et Refluxus rationes in Mari Anglico…
- The map measures 7 3/4 x 7 3/4″ on a 14 3/4 x 9″ sheet, being folio 141/142.
This is a detail of the larger map (below) with a East-West orientation for bottom-to-top, making the northern North American coastline along the top of the map, with the European coast from Spain to Denmark, and then hopping over to the Nordic countries, and of course with England and Ireland, and lonely Iceland.
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Maps, Cartography, History of Mapmaking — Naming Things
What to Do When the Bombs (and Gas) Come(s)–Austria, 1935.

JF Ptak Science Books (Earlier post corrected).

This is another in a series of posts about the use of maps and images in propaganda, principally concentrating in the 1930’s and 1940’s. This pamphlet, Luftschutz durch Selbstschutz Schtz fuer jedermann bei Fliegerangrissen), was published by the Luftschutzbund and written by Hugo Noll in Vienna in 1935. The title page claims that this is the 4th (augmented) edition, with the print run already above 30,000 (which you can either believe or not (is there anyone who starts their program out as version 1.0?))

The pamphlet begins right at the beginning–the cover shows Austria in red, surrounded by airplanes of its enemies, with a bomb coming down into the heart of the country in a yellow triangle (which resembles a flame). The striking design begs to be picked up by anyone who sees it–as I did, as a person here in its future; I’m sure that it must’ve been very provocative to its target audience. It gets immediately into the idea of Austria being surrounded by nations who wish do it harm by air. Another map in the text is more detailed and shows exactly where the threat was coming from–as you can see the threat was coming perhaps from everywhere, except Germany, which as the map indicates had no aircraft in its air force. Austria of course would be annexed in the Anschluss of 12 March 1938, just three years later.

The main body of the text is a series of warnings about what to do when the bombs come; the rest of it has to do with preparing yourself and your household from attack, which means that there’s allot of digging and canning and putting away water and fire retardant. In general the population was getting very stirred up about the sure-to-arrive but survivable Apocalypse.
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Maps, Cartography, History of Mapmaking — Maps/Diagrams of Imagination & Ideas — World War II