JF Ptak Science Books

A Great Map of the "Other" London Underground: the Sewer System, 1990

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In order ot have an Industrial Revolution, you need people, and the people (given the times) needed to live close to where they would work. Large number of people all living in close proximity to work means that they need to live close together; close together means that there needs to be essential services, like water. And of course with water you need a place for it all to "go"--and perhaps the "goingest" of water in the city would be for waste. So, if you can't get rid of waste, then you have no Industrial Revolution. Or something along those lines.

In any event that leads me into this fantastic map of the "other" London underground, the sewer system, the alternative outflowing lifeblood of the great city.

The map appears in the Report of the Results of an Examination Made in 1880 of Several Sewerage Works in Europe, by Rudolph Hering, in the Annual Report of the National Board of Health 1881 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1882), pp. 99-223.

• The original version of this map is offered for sale at the blog bookstore, here. 

And a detail:

Maps of Commonality and Hope in Transport Through a 1939 Kitchen

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There have been many unusual maps registered on this blog over seven years (see Maps/Presentation of Imagination and Ideas here as well as Maps/History of Cartography, here) not the least of which are several long posts on maps of imaginary places.  (I should also say that perhaps my selection for the most beautiful map of all time is the Bellman's Map [of nothing] from Lewis Carroll's Hunting of the Snark.)  

• See also: A Map of the Kingdom of Corsets, here.

The maps below are a presentation of Commonality and Hope in Transport Through a 1939 Kitchen, and appear in Electric Kitchens, and How to Plan Them, published by the Modern Kitchen Bureau (of course), of 420 Lex, NYC.  It is much more difficult to find/stumble upon unusual maps such as these compared with displaying the first map to depict California as an island or some such notion, so I think it is slightly significant that when these unexpected pearls present themselves that they should be shared, or at least indexed.  

Electric Kitchens and the Kitchen Bureau were no doubt funded by Con Edison or a manufacturer of electric kitchen appliances, because what we see in this pamphlet is the promise of saved time and efficiency and cleanliness by using electric stoves and dishwashers and refrigerators and mixers and blenders and ovens and ventilating fans and toasters and even clocks.  

And so, movement in a pre-mostly-electric kitchen looks complex:

Whereas the promise of the new ultra-electric kitchen looks incredibly streamlined, with a message to the reader that you won't spend any time in the kitchen at all:

When these folks say "minimum" they really mean it--really, it is more like minimum being the maximum.  

And since we're on the min/max bit right now I would be remiss if I didn't include a view of the modern kitchen, offered in modern color:

Maps: Climate Change, Population, Drought

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Interactive Map on Global Warming Opinions

Click a state and more detailed parts of the questionnaire are revealed, including whether the climate change is largely a result of human action and thirteen other questions arranged in the three areas of policy  support, risk perception, and beliefs.  

One odd thing is the percentage of people opposed to renewable energy R+D--I'm not sure why 21% would say so, why someone would be against becoming more-or-less self-sufficient. Another 25% are opposed to regulating CO₂ emisisons, which combined with the renewable opposition is frustrating to comprehend.  

SOURCE:  http://environment.yale.edu/poe/v2014

Population

The 2015 World Population Cartogram, showing country population in discrete blocks equal to one million people each.  Not a projection but looks like one, and interesting:

SOURCE:  NPR blog, here  http://i.imgur.com/I81xSNt.png

 

Drought Map, 2011-2015.
There's a fine and scary interactive map if you follow the link to the NPR site showing the development of the drought situation in 1200 counties in the U.S.

SOURCE:  http://www.npr.org/2012/07/18/156989764/interactive-mapping-the-u-s-drought

History of Lines--Straightening out the Thames

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The architect Willey Reveley straightened out curves and curved out straight lines. 

Source: Wikimedia. 

As we can see here he had the idea of constructing a straightaway through the three famous bends of the River Thames in East London.  The straight part would be used for commerce while the bends would become docks and yards.  

Another vision by Reveley is seen below, from page 113 of Alexander Forrow's The Thames and its Docks, a Lecture (London), 1877 (the full text available at the Internet Archive):

Source:  Wikicommons 

With all of this straightening-out of the river thinking going on in Reveley it is interesting to see that when he applied his brain to the the world of very straight lines as they exist in prisons that he went the other way--following the idea and commission by Jeremy Bentham, Reveley created plans for a circular prison. Bentham's Panopticon was an idea that wouldn't leave Bentham and occupied at least one small part of his brain throughout the 1790's--I'm not sure where in Reveley's head the idea lived, but it didn't live there for long, as the architect died at a very young 39 in 1799. Bentham (born in 1748) lived until 1832, and never did see his Panopticon constructed. (Then again, he may come to see it if someone showed it to him, as his head has been preserved as an on- and off-again display at University College...)

 

Source:  http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/11/Panopticon.jpg

Nazi Propaganda Map for a European Hearts and Minds Campaign

JF Ptak Science Books  (Post 193 from 2008) Expanded and with better images. 

These two, related, pamphlets were the products of the Nazi Propaganda engine and sought to affect the moral and intellectual stamina of the people in the occupied countries of the Netherlands and France in 1943.   Each stressed the enormous differences in the German state that took place in the 25 years between the end of World War I and the third year of the Nazi European part of World War II.  I’ve no idea whatsoever about the grander symbology  (if any) of these numbers associated with these two pamphlets (the Roman numeral for “5” and the 25 years of the difference and the “13” points (of the French propaganda) aside from the obvious mathematical implications.

(The only interesting bit that I can find in the “18=43” from the French pamphlet is Luke 18:43 “Immediately the man could see again and began to follow Jesus, glorifying God. All the people saw this and gave praise to God.”. )   I find it curious that identical symbolism (?) was used for the two countries, and that the French version was simple comparative text (summarizing the differences in the two periods of time) while the Dutch version was mainly a picture book. 

I would reprint the French version if it wasn't so bloodily hateful.  (Suffice to say that this is so by looking at one example: in the last of the second issue of 13 points  Goebbels et alia wrapped themselves in the insulating fabric of the German “people” in the “resistance” against “Jewish saboteurs”—not the German political machine, and not the German military, but the German people, insinuating that the Nazi annihilation of the Jewish people was de facto sanctioned by the will of the German nation.  This is of course part and parcel of the fictitious and loathsome Protocols of the Elders of Zion (of which Henry Ford was a happy reader), a French work that was completely stolen and plagiarized by Imperial Russia in the early 1880's and which, later,  Hitler used to both build his hate against the Jewish people and use (and acknowledge ) as the template for his early actions in the Nazi Party.)

The maps used in the Dutch publication are fairly general and issue a stark warning about the growth of Germany--and how Germany continues to grow through war.  The first that we reprint, above, tries to get the point across to the occupied people that England has more problems to deal with than would concern their attention with the Netherlands.  The second part of the first map crazily shows the attack upon England and the effectively exhausting attention it has to pay to many points of invasion.  Ditto for the second map, showing the spread of American concerns--the U.S. in 1943 would have far more to deal with in many points in a two-ocean war than to concern itself with or have the ability to think about the liberation of Europe and the Netherlands.  The last map shows the supposedly extraordinary growth in Germany's  industrial and agricultural capacity. 

In short, the maps tell its readers to just keep quiet, the German nation is mighty, and just wait for the end of the victorious German war.  The maps also addressed non-readers--of course the Dutch literacy rate was extremely high, but you didn't have to be able to read the description of the map to understand its blunt message. (This makes me wonder if the maps really weren't intended for scare tactics against children.)  As Boss Tweed once infamously reported--that he had no fear of editorials because his constituency couldn't read--he hadn't counted on the political cartoons of Thomas Nast--which could be understood by a non-reader--and which wound up being one of the direct causes of his exposure and downfall. 

 

Surrender Propaganda Map of Heavily Bombed Germany, One Week in 1945

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This is a map of The End: "One Week over Germany"..."a week of retaliatory fire" ('vergeltungsfeuer"). It is a piece of propaganda dropped on Germany along with high explosives, a small convincing element to entice soldiers to surrender and save Allied lives in the final push to Berlin.It is a map that shows much more than just the beginning of the end--it is the ending of the end, two-moves-to-mate.  No more failed stalemate, no more breakouts, no more attacks, no more nothing.

I'd find it hard to believe that any Germany soldier would disbelieve what this map represented.  

[Private collection]

And the reverse:

A Simple Map of Possible Intention (1943/3)

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Given my non-existent Spanish skills, the closest I can come to interpreting this tiny pamphlet (published in 1943 and received by the Library of Congress three days before D-Day in 1944 and me in 1998)  is that it was a word of caution.  The warning is obvious--that Yugoslavia was of interest to the Soviet Union--but in 1943 given the state of the war and Yugoslavia being occupied by several Axis forces the concerns of being overtaken by Moscow seem to be way down the to-do list.  The Soviets did provide limited assistance, and they did leave Yugoslavia at teh end of the war, and there was a Communist government established there in 1946--but by 1948 there was a break in relations between it and the USSR, and Yugoslavia attempted to remain non-aligned.  

The map is simplified and very direct, which makes it pretty effective.  Why it was printed in Spanish, I don't know.  

Nazi Propaganda Map of Communist Threat and Expansion, 1933

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Not long after Hitler's election in 1933 this curious pamphlet appeared: Ein Kampf um Deutschland (1933), short and thin, is a  work filled with anti-Communist photos and images portraying them in as harsh a bad light as you could muster in 32 pages.One of the images is this map showing in no uncertain terms threats to Germany from the west, but most importantly a gigantic threat coming from the Communist east, the arrow striking right through the heart of Germany, with the hammer and sickle (the symbol only about 16 years old at the time) coming to rest just about on top of Berlin.  

For all of this Hitler would sign a Non-Aggression Pact with the Soviet Union six years later (22 August 1939) with the plan of dividing some Eastern conquests with the Russians.  Less than two years later came Operation Barbarossa, with Hitler launching a massive surprise invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941. Dozens of millions of lives later, it would all be over in four years.  

And the opened cover for the pamphlet, or what is left of it:

U.S. Air Service Map: is Part of the Country Raised, or the Rest Lowered?

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2422

Yesterday I posted a lovely octahedron map showing intercontiental air routes in 1956 (here). Today, looking in LIFE magazine for some images and a story about U.S. GI's being exposed to nuclear blast tests I bumped into this unusual two-and-a-half dimension map showing domestic air routes of American Airlines (November, 1951).  The national service areas are chunked-up, given some enormous height, not making things very comfortable-looking for the Pacific W and northern Mid-West, and almost the entire South.  I guess the question would be, were the service areas heightened, or the rest of the world lowered?  

 

The first transcontinental flight competition called for crossing the country in 30 days (for a $50k prize) and was accomplished in 1911. By 1933 the fist transcontinental through-flight (a one-day, not-overnight flight) occurred just 22 years later in 1933; only 5 years before this map was made was the first 1-stop service (1946), which is one reason why there are so many intermittent stops; it would be another two years (1953) for there to be non-stop service.  The of course the not-slow explosion of competing airlines and flights. 

It is interesting to recall that the first transcontinental railroad for the U.S. was in 1869, and the first European transcontinental railroad was 14 years before that (in 1855), thus getting people across the country and continent 80 and then nearly 100 years ago.  On the other hand ,the first trans-Australian RR was completed in 1917--that was east-west. North-south is a different issue for Australia, which has been an historically very highly difficult crossing., In any event that line was not completed until 2004.  All things considered, I think, this transcontinental air business was extremely successful and fast, coming less than 50 years after the first Wright powered flight.  

A Fine and Interesting Map of Air Routes, 1956

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F.V. Botley's map of international airline routes--interesting the author points out that the routes have stayed "substantially unchanged for the last two decades". The (above) is based on a regular octahedron, which opens to a star-shaped design (in figure 2, below) and which is not truly related in the larger map--it is "an oblique gnomonic projection designed on this principle", making it an easier read.  [Source: Journal of Geography, 1956, pg 397.]

A Great Map Showing a Complex Distribution of Nationalities, NYC 1895

JF Ptak Science Books    (Post 1343--expanded)

Frederick Erastus Pierce (1878-1935) is the creator of the extraordinary The Tenement-House Committee Maps: printed on one sheet of paper for Harper's Weekly in 1895, Pierce presents his data on the distribution of the population of Manhattan with two maps,  one showing the densities of Manhattan populations (on top) and the other the distribution of nationalities (at bottom). 

[I should point out that the original of this map is for sale at our blog bookstore, here.]

Here's an overall view of the maps--this example from the Library of Congress, as I could not make an accurate image of the one I have here--I do include some details of the maps from my own copy, however, which are found just above, with several below.

 

In Really, Really, "Dark" Africa (1879)

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Advertisers for Henry M. Stanley's Through the Dark Continent could not paint Africa any darker than they did in this ad which appeared in the journal Nature on May 3, 1878.  Stanley plowed his way through Africa from 1874 to 1877, and was quickly into print on his return, which may have been more armed Imperial Pushing than it was a geographical expedition.  

Stanley published another book, In Darkest Africa. twelve years later in 1890, no doubt alluding to the unimaginably dark places of a dark place.  

And just for the sport of it I had a quick tour around the massive 75,000,000-item database of library holdings in WorldCat and found that there may be only one other book earlier than Stanley's published with dark/darkest Africa/Continent in the title (Christian Liberia, the Hope of the Dark Continent, with Special Reference to the Work and Mission of Edward S. Morris, 1838). After Stanley's book was published there are easily dozens of other books using that phrase published between 1878-1900. So there's that. In my long career of looking at maps I cannot recall the continent appearing on world maps as simply an entirely blacked out/filled-in geographical region--certainly in earlier maps of Africa (or at least before 1900) the unknown spots were simply left blank; the older the map the more likely it was to be that the blank spots were filled in with unusual representation of flora and fauna.  But never, it seems to me, was it just entirely black.  

The full add looks like this:

Display of Data: WWII Resource Material Maps

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The Battle of Supplies (1944) is an interesting propaganda publication, simultaneously celebrating achievements and promoting the new for greater production.  The method of displaying the relatively simple data is pretty striking.

 

Beautiful Lines: Depicting the Climate, 1851

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This beautiful network of lines tells the early story of weather in cartographic form. They appear on Karte der Isothermen, Isoklinen, Isogonen und Isodynamen mit der Magnetischen Meridianen, and was published in the atlas volume¹ to accompany the best-selling encyclopedic presentation of the natural history knowledge of the world to that time, Baron Alexander von Humboldt's Kosmos, which was published over a period of several from 1845-1862. The map demonstrates and visualizes climatic information showing isothermes, isoclines, isogones and isodynamics, with the magnetic meridian.

[This is a detail of the Northern Hemisphere section of the double-hemisphere map, which is reproduced below.]

At bottom there is also a beautiful 32-point wind rose:

And this, the full version of the map:

And the detail of the Southern Hemisphere:

Notes:

1.  The atlas was by T. Bromme, Atlas zu Alex. V. Humboldt's Kosmos in zweiundvierzig Tafeln mit erlauterndem Texte. Herausgegeben von Traugott Bromme. Stuttgart. Verlag von Krais & Hoffman. (with second title page) Atlas zur Physik der Welt in ... Bromme, 1851. 

Beautiful Lines: Depicting Voyages of Discovery, 850-1850

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 This small detail (measuring about 1/3" square) is from a fine, detailed, and oddly beautiful map (itself only about 12x9") which was published in the atlas volume¹ to accompany the best-selling encyclopedic presentation of the natural history knowledge of the world to that time, Baron Alexander von Humboldt's Kosmos, which was published over a period of several from 1845-1862.  

The map is titled Die Ozeanischen Entdeckungen und die  um die Kunde des erdballs verdienten  Forscher  und Reisenden vom Jahre 840-1850, and depicts voyages of discovery for a milennium, 850-1850. It is a terrifically-detailed map, even among highly-detailed maps. (This detail is taken froma 1x2" section seen here:)

 

And the full map:

Notes:

1.  The atlas was by T. Bromme, Atlas zu Alex. V. Humboldt's Kosmos in zweiundvierzig Tafeln mit erlauterndem Texte. Herausgegeben von Traugott Bromme. Stuttgart. Verlag von Krais & Hoffman. (with second title page) Atlas zur Physik der Welt in ... Bromme, 1851.