The eight-speaker event took place on Zoom on November 30th, 2021, at 6pm UK time.

IMCoS Event Page

Playlist of all videos here.

Chat from meeting here.

Biography for Peter Walker

After a degree in Biochemistry and a career as a Chartered Accountant with one of the global firms, Peter now spends most of his time collecting and studying maps, of the county of Essex (the English one) and of the British Isles. His interest in collecting started with seeing an “error” on the 1777 map which is the centrepiece of his talk.

He created the published catalogue of printed maps of Essex held at the Essex Record Office and has presented many talks to local societies on Essex maps. He is also the Membership Secretary of IMCoS.

Talk Synopsis

The Chapman & Andre map of Essex is one of the large-scale county maps produced in the 18^th century, seeking to be far more detailed that anything that had been printed before. The talk will look at the whole map and many details, including its demonstration of how British Society was structured.

https://map-of-essex.uk/

https://map-of-essex.uk/

Biography for Peter Walker

After a degree in Biochemistry and a career as a Chartered Accountant with one of the global firms, Peter now spends most of his time collecting and studying maps, of the county of Essex (the English one) and of the British Isles. His interest in collecting started with seeing an “error” on the 1777 map which is the centrepiece of his talk.

He created the published catalogue of printed maps of Essex held at the Essex Record Office and has presented many talks to local societies on Essex maps. He is also the Membership Secretary of IMCoS.

Talk Synopsis

The Chapman & Andre map of Essex is one of the large-scale county maps produced in the 18^th century, seeking to be far more detailed that anything that had been printed before. The talk will look at the whole map and many details, including its demonstration of how British Society was structured.

https://map-of-essex.uk/

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From Laurence Penney:

A map fan ever since I can remember, with a day job in font technology, around 15 years ago I started collecting maps that focus on one particular route. The subjects are roads, rivers, railways, flight paths and so on, and they come in a wide variety of formats. Now numbering in the 1000s, and with many fascinating items unmentioned in the literature, the collection will soon provide the source material for a website on “one-dimensional maps”, with (hopefully!) frequent updates.

The map I’ll talk about at the Show and Tell is "Carte Spéciale des Chemins de Fer et Télégraphes de Belgique" by Eugène Leloup, dating from 1859. It’s a complex diagram that shows the Belgian railway system as a geographic network at the same time as a timetable, in a manner that is (as far as I know) unique with neither ancestor nor heir.

KBR Museum

KBR Museum - link 2

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The chart was produced in 1686 by cartographer and globe and instrument maker Philip Lea (fl. 1666-1700, London).

I believe this chart is quite rare as I found only one other example which is located in the British Library.

The map represents the Southern Hemisphere from an external point of view.

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IMCoS Show & Tell 2, Mark Monmonier, Syracuse University

John Byron Plato’s Clock System Map of Genesee County, New York, exemplifies an innovative, patented wayfinding system devised in early twentieth century America to give farmers a “real address” different from that used by the Post Office. Although a Rural Free Delivery (RFD) address was useful for delivering mail, it was failed the rural traveler eager for the motor vehicle’s social and economic benefits.

I bought my Genesee County map on eBay for a mere $13.94 USD (including tax and shipping) while completing a biography of Plato and his efforts to combat rural isolation. Scheduled for release in March, Clock and Compass: How John Byron Plato Gave Farmers a “Real Address” examines a clever technician’s efforts to make a living by engaging schoolchildren, agriculturalists, and local businesses in a mutually beneficial cartographic enterprise. Because Clock System maps are rare in libraries and institutional map collections, my purchase was a fortuitous find.

Plato invented the Clock System around 1914, when he was a Colorado farmer who lost the sale of some calves to a buyer who couldn’t find his farm. He got the idea for the Clock System while staring at his watch, which had stopped, and recalling the buyer’s lament, “It takes time to find your place.” After failing to license his innovation to the Post Office Department, he was distracted briefly by an ambitious promoter with an extravagant business plan that collapsed under its own weight. Eager to move forward, Plato set up his own company to make and market Clock System maps. A minor figure in the history of cartography, and one of the few who obtained a patent, Plato is noteworthy for having developed his patent commercially.

A Clock System address is based on three steps. After identifying a scattering of locally important business centers, Plato configured a hub-and-spoke referencing framework around each center. Evenly spaced spokes defined a dozen sectors, numbered 1 through 12 like the hours on a clockface. Concentric circles spaced a mile apart and numbered 0, 1, 2, and so forth provided a second coordinate to divide the trade area into “blocks” identified by their hour and mile. Within a block, individual farmsteads were then assigned a unique letter. In addition to a map, the Clock System required a “rural directory” that listed farmers alphabetically along with an address consisting of the name of the central place, the block’s hour and mile numbers, and the farmstead’s identifying letter.

The directory was also a vehicle for advertising, which was an important part of Plato’s revenue stream. Individual map-and-directory sets could be purchased, but one set was provided free to every farmer in the county. Complete coverage made the system attractive to local or national firms selling a diverse array of milking machines, tractors, and other products used on farms as well as consumer goods available at local stores. To cultivate the loyalty of local merchants, Plato did not accept ads from distant companies that did not sell through a local dealer.

Plato’s multiple careers make an intriguing story. He was a student at a pioneering manual-arts high-school in Denver, a soldier in the Spanish-American War, a draftsman, a dealer in veneers and manager of a lumber yard, an inventor and manufacturer of a patented parking brake for horse-drawn vehicles, a schoolteacher, and a livestock farmer, in roughly that order. In early 1896, before starting high school, he attended Cornell University’s three-month Winter Short Course for Farm Youth. Despite an apparent thirst for rural living, he did not have a farm of his own until 1909, when he started buying five-acre lots seven miles north of Denver.

Plato continued to innovate with marketing strategies and graphic design. My Genesee County Clock System map reflects a new approach to labeling farmsteads. Instead of seemingly random letters, merely unique within each block, it relies on two-part house labels consisting of a number and letter. As illustrated in the enlarged excerpt, the letter identifies a particular thoroughfare extending across multiple blocks and the sequential integer that precedes it represents the farmstead’s relative position along the route. Genesee is one of the state’s smaller counties, and its roughly rectangular shape is well suited to a printed sheet. The shapes of many other counties were more challenging.

Maps were an essential part of the wayfinding systems that evolved as rural America enthusiastically adopted the automobile. Although cadastral maps (property maps) were efficient for describing the size and location of farms and other large tracts of land, travelers required routes described graphically on a map of roads, railways, and unambiguous landmarks or verbally or numerically as a list of distances, directions, and turns. Either approach worked well in cities with named streets, house numbers, and abundant signage, but in open country wayfinding guidance (if provided at all) consisted largely of crossroad signs pointing to the next significant place, identified merely by its name and distance. The Good Roads movement of the 1890s led to paved public highways and official route numbers­­ inscribed on free oil-company road maps, but destinations off the primary road network were largely terra incognita. Although the Post Office began selling its RFD maps, on which letter carriers’ prescribed routes were suited to commercial travelers working for the Fuller Brush Company, the more flexible Clock System served a wider audience.

National Geographic article

IMCoS Show & Tell 2, Mark Monmonier, Syracuse University

John Byron Plato’s Clock System Map of Genesee County, New York, exemplifies an innovative, patented wayfinding system devised in early twentieth century America to give farmers a “real address” different from that used by the Post Office. Although a Rural Free Delivery (RFD) address was useful for delivering mail, it was failed the rural traveler eager for the motor vehicle’s social and economic benefits.

I bought my Genesee County map on eBay for a mere $13.94 USD (including tax and shipping) while completing a biography of Plato and his efforts to combat rural isolation. Scheduled for release in March, Clock and Compass: How John Byron Plato Gave Farmers a “Real Address” examines a clever technician’s efforts to make a living by engaging schoolchildren, agriculturalists, and local businesses in a mutually beneficial cartographic enterprise. Because Clock System maps are rare in libraries and institutional map collections, my purchase was a fortuitous find.

Plato invented the Clock System around 1914, when he was a Colorado farmer who lost the sale of some calves to a buyer who couldn’t find his farm. He got the idea for the Clock System while staring at his watch, which had stopped, and recalling the buyer’s lament, “It takes time to find your place.” After failing to license his innovation to the Post Office Department, he was distracted briefly by an ambitious promoter with an extravagant business plan that collapsed under its own weight. Eager to move forward, Plato set up his own company to make and market Clock System maps. A minor figure in the history of cartography, and one of the few who obtained a patent, Plato is noteworthy for having developed his patent commercially.

A Clock System address is based on three steps. After identifying a scattering of locally important business centers, Plato configured a hub-and-spoke referencing framework around each center. Evenly spaced spokes defined a dozen sectors, numbered 1 through 12 like the hours on a clockface. Concentric circles spaced a mile apart and numbered 0, 1, 2, and so forth provided a second coordinate to divide the trade area into “blocks” identified by their hour and mile. Within a block, individual farmsteads were then assigned a unique letter. In addition to a map, the Clock System required a “rural directory” that listed farmers alphabetically along with an address consisting of the name of the central place, the block’s hour and mile numbers, and the farmstead’s identifying letter.

The directory was also a vehicle for advertising, which was an important part of Plato’s revenue stream. Individual map-and-directory sets could be purchased, but one set was provided free to every farmer in the county. Complete coverage made the system attractive to local or national firms selling a diverse array of milking machines, tractors, and other products used on farms as well as consumer goods available at local stores. To cultivate the loyalty of local merchants, Plato did not accept ads from distant companies that did not sell through a local dealer.

Plato’s multiple careers make an intriguing story. He was a student at a pioneering manual-arts high-school in Denver, a soldier in the Spanish-American War, a draftsman, a dealer in veneers and manager of a lumber yard, an inventor and manufacturer of a patented parking brake for horse-drawn vehicles, a schoolteacher, and a livestock farmer, in roughly that order. In early 1896, before starting high school, he attended Cornell University’s three-month Winter Short Course for Farm Youth. Despite an apparent thirst for rural living, he did not have a farm of his own until 1909, when he started buying five-acre lots seven miles north of Denver.

Plato continued to innovate with marketing strategies and graphic design. My Genesee County Clock System map reflects a new approach to labeling farmsteads. Instead of seemingly random letters, merely unique within each block, it relies on two-part house labels consisting of a number and letter. As illustrated in the enlarged excerpt, the letter identifies a particular thoroughfare extending across multiple blocks and the sequential integer that precedes it represents the farmstead’s relative position along the route. Genesee is one of the state’s smaller counties, and its roughly rectangular shape is well suited to a printed sheet. The shapes of many other counties were more challenging.

Maps were an essential part of the wayfinding systems that evolved as rural America enthusiastically adopted the automobile. Although cadastral maps (property maps) were efficient for describing the size and location of farms and other large tracts of land, travelers required routes described graphically on a map of roads, railways, and unambiguous landmarks or verbally or numerically as a list of distances, directions, and turns. Either approach worked well in cities with named streets, house numbers, and abundant signage, but in open country wayfinding guidance (if provided at all) consisted largely of crossroad signs pointing to the next significant place, identified merely by its name and distance. The Good Roads movement of the 1890s led to paved public highways and official route numbers­­ inscribed on free oil-company road maps, but destinations off the primary road network were largely terra incognita. Although the Post Office began selling its RFD maps, on which letter carriers’ prescribed routes were suited to commercial travelers working for the Fuller Brush Company, the more flexible Clock System served a wider audience.

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https://www.loc.gov/item/2012585334/

Dr. Katherine Parker FRGS, Research Officer

Dr. Katherine Parker (FRGS) earned a BA (Hons.) in History and International Studies at Oregon State University, University Honors College (2006). She studied at the University of Pittsburgh for her MA (2012) and PhD in History (2016), where she specialized in the creation of Pacific geographic knowledge in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Her area of expertise is in the early modern European history of cartography.

Upon graduation, she was awarded a Hakluyt Society Research Fellowship. She has also held fellowships from the American Bibliographical Society, the John Carter Brown Library, and the Mellon Foundation. She was also elected as a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and is currently the Administrative Editor for the Hakluyt Society, which specializes in the publication of primary sources for the history of global exploration.

She joined Barry Lawrence Ruderman Antique Maps in autumn 2016 as the Research Officer.

https://www.raremaps.com/site/about

Raremaps.com

I would like to explore one of my favourite maps of the world based upon what was wrong by Joseph Moxon (1627-1691). He was a British cartographer and the hydrographer to Charles II after the Restoration of the Monarchy and a Fellow of the Royal Society. He was also a printer of maps, globes, mathematical books and instruments.

In his map, A MAP OF ALL OF THE EARTH AND HOW AFTER THE FLOOD IT WAS DIVIDED AMONG THE SONS OF NOAH, BY J. MOXON, California is shown as an island. California was the name given to the mythical island populated by Amazon warriors. Mapmakers used the name “California” to label the unexplored territory on the North American west coast.

Second, Moxon theorized that the Arctic was ice-free and warmed by 24 hours of sunlight in the summer. He assumed that Arctic ice was only near the land and by sailing northward, a Northwest Passage would be found near the North Pole. These opinions influenced future explorers, such as Captain Cook, to search for the Northwest Passage.

Third, it was a Map of all the Earth after the Flood, which was divided among the Sons of Noah. North America is marked as “Japhet.” The commentary noted Americans must be derived from the sons of Japhet. What about the early migration of people from Asia during prior Ice Ages that populated North America? Apparently, these people did not stop in North America, but continued their migration to South America.

Fourth, we all want to know where the Garden of Eden was located - and now we know the location in Asia!

Fifth, the map is surrounded by 14 vignettes from engravings by Wenceslaus Hollar, which encircles the world geographically with Biblical time by depicting Biblical scenes from the Creation to the New Jerusalem. So, you know all about the major events from creation to the end of the world. There you have it, all that you need to know about the world.

Also, the map is very current by identifying Pennsylvania [key # 57 Pensilvania], which was charted in the same 1681 year of publication of this map. On March 4, 1681, Charles II of England granted the Province of Pennsylvania to William Penn. Plus, there are some other interesting names of places, which are surprising.

I would like to explore one of my favourite maps of the world based upon what was wrong by Joseph Moxon (1627-1691). He was a British cartographer and the hydrographer to Charles II after the Restoration of the Monarchy and a Fellow of the Royal Society. He was also a printer of maps, globes, mathematical books and instruments.

In his map, A MAP OF ALL OF THE EARTH AND HOW AFTER THE FLOOD IT WAS DIVIDED AMONG THE SONS OF NOAH, BY J. MOXON, California is shown as an island. California was the name given to the mythical island populated by Amazon warriors. Mapmakers used the name “California” to label the unexplored territory on the North American west coast.

Second, Moxon theorized that the Arctic was ice-free and warmed by 24 hours of sunlight in the summer. He assumed that Arctic ice was only near the land and by sailing northward, a Northwest Passage would be found near the North Pole. These opinions influenced future explorers, such as Captain Cook, to search for the Northwest Passage.

Third, it was a Map of all the Earth after the Flood, which was divided among the Sons of Noah. North America is marked as “Japhet.” The commentary noted Americans must be derived from the sons of Japhet. What about the early migration of people from Asia during prior Ice Ages that populated North America? Apparently, these people did not stop in North America, but continued their migration to South America.

Fourth, we all want to know where the Garden of Eden was located - and now we know the location in Asia!

Fifth, the map is surrounded by 14 vignettes from engravings by Wenceslaus Hollar, which encircles the world geographically with Biblical time by depicting Biblical scenes from the Creation to the New Jerusalem. So, you know all about the major events from creation to the end of the world. There you have it, all that you need to know about the world.

Also, the map is very current by identifying Pennsylvania [key # 57 Pensilvania], which was charted in the same 1681 year of publication of this map. On March 4, 1681, Charles II of England granted the Province of Pennsylvania to William Penn. Plus, there are some other interesting names of places, which are surprising.

http://www.fadensmapofnorfolk.co.uk/index.asp

http://www.fadensmapofnorfolk.co.uk/index.asp

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McMaster University

McMaster University

McMaster University

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