Isochronic Map shows how long it took to travel the world in 1914 (2015)

The original is from John Bartholomew and co. from the Edinburgh Geographical Institute. It was published in 1914 in the Atlas of economic geography by Oxford University Press. https://archive.org/details/atlasofeconomicg00bart/page/n93

Your new map omits Lake Michigan but includes the text "Lake Michigan".

It's a bit unexpected to see the interior of the Amazon region is more accessible than the interior of Australia or the northern regions of Alaska. My guess is that commerce is driving exploration/exploitation of the interior of the Amazon (more than those other places).

Not sure how the new map was generated, but it would be extremely cool to be able to plug in any city and have a map generated. Or at the very least have it for other major cities; I'd totally buy one with times from San Francisco.

I'd love to get one with Frankfurt/Germany in the center and would probably buy it as a Christmas gift for all our employees based here.

Do you know how much hand massaging the data was necessary?

I remember reading under an emergency the Roman's sent a new governor to London from Rome. With the ability to commandeer any resources available, took him about 22 days.

1600 years later the British recalled an ambassador from Rome under an emergency. Took him 22 days.

"ORBIS is designed for modern browsers and uses technology that works best in Chrome or Safari. If you want to try ORBIS in your unsupported browser, click here"

Double sigh, me & my Firefox.

Very informative. Wonder how long it took to get from Greece to India at that time? Remember seeing a reference in a book on influence of the Cynics school on the later Platonic Academy, post Roman conquest, to a letter from one wealthy aristocrats' son to another concerning some 'Grand Tour' where they would travel to India to interact with Brahman intellectuals, then off to Persia to interact with Magi (there was a reference to the Dervish being useless) then back to Greece. Must have been at least a two year excursion.

Thanks for sharing!

Also for those interested, there's an open source project which will do this too, given GTFS data: http://docs.opentripplanner.org/en/latest/Intermediate-Tutor...

It's extremely fiddly to set up but it's also a lot more detailed.

I think logically speaking any point within a region can only be as easy to reach as the region itself, and depending how you travel and how you define 'reaching the region' most probably will be required to be harder to reach than the region itself.

That said it must be cool being married to someone from the farthest corner of the earth. Congratulation.

I used to burn with envy when I read about a 19th or early 20th century author or artist just picking up or moving to Paris, etc. I never read _anything_ about visas, immigration, etc.

Even now, there's no shortage of travel blogs talking about moving to a new country and the vast majority fail to address this key detail (usually it seems they're written by a spouse of someone from said country).

It would appear it did indeed used to be easier to travel pre-WWI, at least in terms of paperwork. There one was an understanding we should abolish passports: http://uk.businessinsider.com/when-governments-wanted-to-get...

Unfortunately, I strongly suspect that the main reason we keep immigration controls around is that not long after we brought them in to force, travel got really cheap. In 1880 traveling internationally was a hell of a lot harder, and one supposes there weren't as many people doing it (even proportionally). There also was just an awful lot more Earth to go around - a world with 1 billion people is a lot less crowded.

Even now, most countries are fine with rich people entering. We just stopped being able to use "they came 5000 miles to get here" as a filter.

It's kind of interesting that even though I'm fairly left, this is one of the arguments against a strong social safety net that I can buy. When you view every potential immigrant as a potential expense it gets harder (even if only politically) to let people in without trying to filter out those likely not to be net contributors.

What nationality are you? Most first world countries can get an automatic 3 months tourist visa to the EU upon landing.

I am also surprised that any nationality (except Americans) would have an easier time getting a US visa than an EU one!

If you want a proper adventure (maybe source your own aircraft?) you can probably go to Svalbard, which is Europe, if only just. The trick is to get there without going through Norway first.

"Svalbard has no border controls, and citizens of the 41 signatories of the Svalbard treaty (including such unlikely countries as Afghanistan and the Dominican Republic) need no visas or other permits to visit – or even work – in Svalbard."

https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Svalbard

I think I remember reading that visas didn't really exist as a thing before the first world war, so it might not have had any effect at all.

As someone about to leave the EU, this makes me sad.