Category: Maps/Diagrams of Imagination & Ideas

JF Ptak Science Books    Post 2000

[This is numbered post 2,000–a number that does not include another 500 or so “Quick Posts”–written for this blog since beginning in February 2008.]

• “Der Erde und Ihre Atmosphare” from Astronomischer Bilderatlas, by Ludwig
  Preyssinger, published in 1853 (with 12 engraved plates¹, following the
  first edition of 1840, which had 10 plates). Source: found at Michael Stoll’s flickr set, a superior and large image, here.]

Our older daughter Emma asked that question years ago, when she was six or seven.  It was a great question, and one of those questions, really, that only kids can come up with. It is also reminiscent of Ruth Krauss and Maurice Sendak’s A Hole is to Dig, a classic work published in 1952 with these sorts of question/responses, a kid-cratic method of inquiry and answer, that is possible generally only with a younger and fluid mind.  (“What is a hole? A hole is when you step in it you go down” and “a hole is to dig” and so on.)

People from long ago certainly knew that clouds were not nearly as high as the Sun and Moon and stars, but how high could they be? How high was the sky?  How thick was the envelope of air around the Earth?  Exploratory balloon ascents could help that question along, but only somewhat: heights attained in the first 80 years or so of ballooning reached 43,000 feet. (The question of ballooning and the limits of the atmosphere comes up early, as we can see with Jane C. Webb Loudon, the author of the anonymously-published The Mummy!: Or a Tale of the Twenty-Second Century  in 1827, interestingly published nine years after Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein:  “… and the  hampers are filled with elastic plugs for our ears and noses, and tubes  and barrels of common air, for us to breathe when we get beyond the  atmosphere of the earth.”)  In 1803, the record stood at 24,000; in 1835, 26,000; in 1862, 39,000; the record of 43,000 feet was reached in 1927, and at a great cost. On the other hand, more than half of the atmosphere exists at 3 miles above the Earth, and 70% of it is at 5 miles and under; at 22 miles exists about 99% of the atmosphere, and at 62 miles the atmosphere is so thin that it is a virtual vacuum, and is basically negligible. (The exosphere reaches out though to about to about 6,200 miles, but that’s where free moving particles are able to escape the Earth’s gravity and get swept away by the solar wind.)

Herr Preyssinger was trying to exhibit this atmospheric density in his illustration #10 to his beautiful astronomical atlas. (I should add here that Preyssinger’s work is a very uncommon production, made so that several of the engraved plates coul dbe held up to a solitary light source in a dark room and be illuminated cut-outs in the paper which also had transparent material on the verso to difuse the light…very smart.)  His illustration for the atmosphere was very effective, and was set against a plan of the earth made at the equator.  I’ve also included the same plate #10 from a French edition of the same work made slightly later, though the interior of this Earth is colored in a brilliant red.

So when the engraving above was printed in 1862, the balloon ascension record stood at about 5 miles, getting humans to above 70% of the ocean of air.

Relative to humans getting high above the ground, the atmosphere is high; relative to just about everything else–like the 99% at 22 miles compared to the 7,900 or so miles of the Earth’s diameter, the atmosphere is but a thin slip. IF we reached that distance down into the Earth, we would just be touching the outer mantle.

•  Fromt the French edition, printed in 1862, here.  French explanation (Astronomie Populaire ou Description des Corps
  Celestes, Astronomie Populaire en Tableux Transparents...., published in
  1862) of plate X, here. 

Notes:

1. Twelve plates, as follows:  Die Central-Sonne und die Ansicht von der Fixsternwelt; Himmelskarte; Darstellung des Sonnensystems; Vergleichende Darstellung der Grösse der Planeten; Die Sonne und verschiedene Erscheinungen derselben; Der Mond durch das Fernrohr gesehen; Transparente Darstellung der Mondsphasen; Finsternisse; Ansicht von den Jahreszeiten; Die Erde und ihre Atomsphäre; Kometen und Aerolithen.

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The Black Sun and Red Earth, 1862

JF Ptak Science Books    Post 1941  
 

Just yesterday in this blog I made an entry on a very striking, viciously anti-slavery Moral Map of the U.S. It is very red and was printed in 1854, just barely before the great troubles really started to begin in 1856, and it stands on its own as a fine representation of a map-with-a-message.  The map below by John F. Smith (Historical Geography) was printed in 1888, and although it was made after slavery it still carried a very strong message–perhaps not as graphic as the 1854 map, but certainly as vehement, and perhaps more-so, with a very heavy dosage of Reconstructionist retribution laced in its text. There is a sense of channels of warm blood flowing through canali of stone altars, a mass on the chest to Huitzliopochtli.  It has its own sense of deep danger.

[Source:  the Library of Congress.  The map is very expandable.]

The map is divided North and South by two lightning-like trees, “God’s Blessing, Liberty” and “God’s Curse, Slavery.”  The limbs of the tree of Liberty read “Light, Joy, Hope, Faith, Charity, Patience, Benevolence, Philanthropy, Love of Country, Equal Rights, Obedience to Law, Peace, Honor, Truth, Virtue, Sobriety, Industry, Contentment, Free Speech, Knowledge, Free School.”

The limbs of the dark, crooked tree of slavery read: “Murder, War, Rebellion, Treason, Secession, Sedition, Superstition, Ignorance, Avarice, Lust” and of course “Hades”. these are hosted on the spikes of the Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1850, Fugitive Slave Laws, Kansas-Nebraska Act, Dred Scott.”

“Hades” might not be that far off, at least for the heat/difficulty index, as this one seems to be located right about at the eastern boundary of the Llano Estacado, which in centuries past was a very highly difficult place to navigate. 

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1940

This incredible, indelible image is another from our collection of graphical representations of data and ideas.  This map, is entitled Moral Map of North America, 1854; (the Slave States are coloued Red, the blighted influence of Slavery is also deeply felt in those parts more slightly streaked with Red)€.  I can find no record of this map, printed obviously by our Brethren across the ocean–€”that and the fact that it was printed in 1854 is all the publishing data that I can find thus far.

The poem at bottom reads:

United States! Your banner wears
Two Emblem €”one of Fame;
Alas! The other it bars
Reminds us of your shame.
The white man’s liberty in types
Stands blazoned by your stars;
But what’s the meaning of your stripes;
They mean your Negro-scars.

Reciting this poem by Thomas Campbell before an abolitionist convention in 6 March 1851, William Wells Brown continued (as was reported in the National Anti-Slavery Standard):

“The name of the United States is becoming a hissing and bye-word in the mouths of the inhabitants of every clime.  My country is indeed the land of oppression. There is not a rood of territory over which the Stars and Stripes€ fly, on which William and Ellen Craft or myself could be protected by law. Wherever the American flag is seen flying on the continent of the New World it points us out as slaves; and we enjoy to-night a degree of freedom in your town that we could not if we were in the land of our birth. I often speak of America as my country, but in point of fact I have no country. In the language of one of the noblest of the Negro’s champions in the United States.  €œMy country is the wide, wide world; My countrymen are all mankind.”€

Brown should know:  his mother was a slave and his father the plantation owner who later granted him his freedom.  Brown then worked the underground railroad and much, much more, working with William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips.  Among his published works included the incredible  Clotel, (1853), which was one of the first novels published by an African-American in the U.S.,  and which discusses in great detail the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and his slave/lover/mistress Sally Hemings.

The map is definitely a tale of morality, showing a definite margin of slavery but also depicting slavery leeching its way through the border states. It is interesting to note that Washington D.C. is represented in red as it was indeed a slave-holding district, with a slave pen right on the Mall in the 1830’s. 

The most striking feature to me of course is the slave who is lashed hand-and-foot to the flagpole on which the American flag is flying, as €”this is the only time that I have seen the slave and the flag portrayed as a unit, together, the slave being tortured by the standard of our country. 

(Here’s another contemporary map depicting the expansion/limitation of slavery from a blog post on the Kansas-Nebraska act on the excellent antiqueprintsblog site, described here):

And this famous map of the United States slave holding region depicting slave ownership by density and by county, which is described in detail (along with pull-outs and expansions at the New York Times website: 

“(Francis Bicknell) Carpenter spent the first six months of 1864 in the White House preparing the portrait (of Lincoln reading the Emancipation Proclamation to his Cabinet), and on more than one occasion found Lincoln poring over the map. Though the president had abundant maps at his disposal, only this one allowed him to focus on the Confederacy’s greatest asset: its labor system. After January 1, 1863—when the Emancipation Proclamation became law—the president could use the map to follow Union troops as they liberated slaves and destabilized the rebellion.” Quote pull from the NYT via Flowing Data.

The Carpenter painting (described in another New York Times piece here, with the map clearly visible at the lower right):

Another fine example of a slavery map showing the details of the institution was made by Adolph von Steinwehr (a cartographer and geographer who would serve as a brigadier general in the Union Army) in 1861:

The data given in the  three maps above is great and indispensable, but the first map still perhaps makes the most indelible impression.