Map History

Harry Beck's map of the London Underground, first released in 1931, is famous because it was one of the first times in modern cartography where an itinerary (or journey) map had no relationship to the geographical space it represented. Even though the stops on the outer edges of the map are miles apart, and the inner city ones are very close, representing the stops that way on paper had been confusing and cluttered until Beck's flash of brilliance. What most people don't know about him is that his true passion and profession was designing circuitry, and the parallels between the schematics are obvious. The reason this map works speaks to something that geographers are very interested in, namely that there is more than one way to know and understand space. We now live in a world dominated by Euclidian geometry, where distance is measured in things like inches and kilometers, and represented as such on maps. Everything depends on this - it's why cell phones work and tennis courts are the same dimensions at the French Open and the U.S. Open. The London Underground map flies in the face of this taken-for-granted principle. It has nothing to do with distance, direction, time, or terrain, yet it is masterful at getting you where you need to go in the most efficient way possible. Strange, no? It is a different way to experience the here/there of space, and movement through space, two themes that I've explored before and themes that I hope to keep in my dissertation. Vessel travel, like in airplanes or subways, is an excellent way to re-experience space in a way that cars or trains don't permit as readily. You don't feel like you're going anywhere. You feel like you're sitting there awaiting to emerge from your hole when the vessel stops, emersed in a new environment.

This map below, and the information on Harry Beck above, comes from a great book that I read today at the beach called "The World Through Maps" by John Short. It's an excellent overview of the field because it includes great reproductions of many of the most important maps in the field, and I reccommend it to anyone interested. The complete citation is at the end of this post.



This is a portolan chart (portolano is Italian for pilot book) from 1547. It was used for navigation, hence the Euclidian straight lines on the water part of the map, but I really like it because it includes racy, symbolic interpretations of the people found on land. This is a rare example of a map that includes this kind of symbolic representation with the mathematical functionality of a navigation chart. Lucky for me, the original Vallard Atals, from which this portolan chart comes, is housed at the Hintington Library in L.A., so I can go look at the original sometime. Cool!

Short, John. 2003. "The World Through Maps: A History of Cartography." Buffalo, NY: Firefly.