Atlas Mountains
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ATLAS MOUNTAINS Facts were the lifeblood of nineteenth-century atlas maps, but publishers needed ingenuity and a little artistic license to present an ever-changing world to their info-hungry readers. Matthew Sturgis admires their creative solutions We live in an age of graphics. Everywhere complex data into a succinct visual form signs and symbols assail us. We are too busy really belongs to the late eighteenth and MOUNTAINS, to read and there is too much information early nineteenth centuries. The enthusiasm OF COURSE, to process, so things get packaged up in of the new industrial age for both order LOOK GOOD pictures – in pie charts, graphs, bar charts, and facts produced a spectacular array of IN SIMPLIFIED word clouds, timelines, and flow diagrams. graphic responses as the wonders of the ILLUSTRATIONS. From the weather map to the share-price physical world were first discovered and VOLCANOES graph, such devices have become familiar in then codified and ordered. CAN BE newspapers and on television. Once static Among the finest – and most character- and formal, they have, with the advent istic – productions of the period are the ADORNED of the computer, grown ever more febrile. charts produced to display the range of the WITH WISPS Pictures no longer sit still: they grow and earth’s recently measured geographical OF SMOKE, morph and merge. And you never know wonders: the relative height of the world’s PEAKS CAN where they are going to appear next: they mountains; the varying lengths of the BE CAPPED pop up on your smartphone, race across world’s rivers. These are extraordinary WITH SNOW billboards, and jiggle on your iPad screen. documents, as much works of art as works Info-graphics, of course, are not a new of science, ingeniously and variously con- phenomenon. Indeed, the notion of putting ceived and often very beautiful. information into visual form is as old as In some of these charts the mountains civilization itself. The cave paintings of are all bunched closely together, piled up, Lascaux are info-graphics of a sort. And the like some wonderful jelly mold. In others, earliest forms of written communication the world’s great peaks are strung out in used pictograms rather than letters. The order across the page in a great diagonal, idea, though, of condensing a mass of like some long mountain range, gradually shelving down from the very highest to the a chart had disposed the mountains in a not quite so high. Or else they are artfully single rising diagonal, then the rivers could arranged into a fantastical landscape, the be lined up, vertically, to fill in the upper great mountains of the Western Hemi- part of the chart – the longest rivers set sphere gathered on the left-hand side of the against the shortest mountains and vice page, the highest peaks of the Eastern versa. Where the jelly-mold layout had been Hemisphere on the right, the puny Alps act- adopted, the rivers might frame the central ing as foothills to the majestic Himalayas. mountain-mass like a fringed pelmet, the Mountains, of course, look good in longest rivers running down the outside simplified illustrations. They have dramatic edge of the page, gradually reducing in triangular silhouettes; they are readily length as they reached the center and the Previous pages: an colored and shaded. Active volcanoes can highest peaks of the mountains. Although engraved and hand-colored be adorned with wisps of smoke, peaks can mountains and rivers are the most easily illustration created for a be capped with snow. Against these bold quantifiable elements of geography, and the library atlas of modern and ancient geography, pictorial forms the schematic representa- most commonly featured in specialized London, 1835. tions of the rivers tend to look rather less charts, other natural features were some- Left: an updated 1845 print from Henry Tanner’s atlas, impressive. Little more than single lines, times added: the world’s highest waterfalls, first published in 1836, straightened out, their mouths aligned at largest lakes, or biggest islands. Table of the Comparative Heights of the Principal the top or bottom of the page, they often The absolutes of mountain height, river Mountains &c. in the resemble so many rats’ tails. length, and lake or island area were of World. The mountains are identified by a number and To compensate for this deficiency the course the main facts conveyed in these a key and are color-coded chartmakers became adept at arranging the charts. But there was always scope for some by continent. The chart rank of rivers into elegant patterns around additional information. Charles Smith’s was written and engraved by Joseph Perkins the main mountain-part of their designs. If Comprehensive View of the Heights of the PATEK PHILIPPE 55 Principal Mountains &c. In the World, which was published in London in 1816, concen- trated mainly on the great peaks of the Andes and the Alps but included several interesting asides. The height of Chimbora- zo (then thought to be “The Highest of the Andes”) was given as 21,470 feet; against 21,000 feet was the note “The Condor fre- quently soars to this Height”; while 19,400 feet was given as “The Height attained by Messers Humboldt and Bonpland on 23 June 1802” during their attempted ascent of Chimborazo. (It was then the world re- was the height reached by Joseph Louis cord.) And 18,225 feet was marked as the Gay-Lussac’s hot air balloon, remarking “Highest Limit of Lichen Plants.” complacently, “C’est le point le plus haut ou Publishers would seek to give their l’homme soit parvenu” (It is the highest charts an added appeal by slanting informa- point ever reached by man). tion toward the likely audience. American- Biblical history and classical mythology produced charts tend to give the height of were also acknowledged by chartmakers. Washington as well as other notable U.S. Henry Tanner’s hugely popular compara- cities and even the “Shot Tower at Philadel- tive chart of the world’s highest mountains In the late eighteenth century, it was phia” (184 feet). British-produced charts are and longest rivers, first published in 1836 generally thought that Chimborazo was the likely to note the height above sea level of and reissued many times in the ensuing highest mountain in the world. In 1808, the Greenwich Observatory (214 feet) and decades, included on its list of mountains, however, the great peak of Dhaulagiri in of “London – at St. Paul’s” (65 feet). The Mount Ararat (9,500 feet), Olympus (9,100 Nepal claimed this position, being meas- handsome chart produced by J. Andriveau- feet), and Mount Tabor (2,000 feet) – scene ured at 26,262 feet. It was knocked off its Goujon in France in 1850 included the of Christ’s Transfiguration. perch 30 years later with the discovery that fact that 7,000 meters (nearly 23,000 feet) For a nineteenth-century audience most the Himalayan Kangchenjunga was higher. of the information in these maps was both And it was only in 1856, following the Great new and exciting. Facts, facts, facts were Trigonometric Survey of British India by Sir the lifeblood of the period. Facts, though, George Everest, that the mountain formerly are not stable. They are subject to change. known as Peak 15 of the Himalayas was rec- One fact can trump another. New facts are ognized as the true top spot – at 29,029 feet always emerging. And throughout the nine- – and later given its discoverer’s name. This atlas map (above), teenth century they emerged at a great rate. Rivers, too, jostled for position. With all entitled Comparative Height of the Principal It was an age of exploration and discovery, the difficulties of tracking a river to its Mountains and other of new scientific methods and ambitious source, with all the questions of tributaries, Elevations in the World, geographical surveys. The understanding there was much scope for debate. Early was engraved by J. Cone and published in of the world and its physical geography was charts tend to put either the Amazon or the 1823 by Fielding Lucas, Jr., in a state of almost constant flux. Mississippi/Missouri first and rank the Nile of Baltimore. By 1864, when the atlas map The about fifth. But, following the discovery of Principal Mountains Lake Victoria as the source of the White Nile, MAP COLLECTION/WWW.DAVIDRUMSEY.COM and Rivers of the World compiled from the Latest it shot up the rankings to Number One. Authorities (left) was Change, of course, was good news for printed by Schonberg & DAVID RUMSEY DAVID Co., New York, the highest publishers. It meant a new edition, a chance mountain in the world to try out new color-printing processes, and had been established – of course – new sales. Even in the pre- as Everest, named PHOTOGRAPHS: after its discoverer iPad age, everyone wanted an upgrade. 56 PATEK PHILIPPE PATEK PHILIPPE 57.