Archive of old military maps published | Hacker News Reader

Archive of old military maps published

ianvisits.co.uk

210 pointsedward37 comments

Centuries ago you could get executed for possessing the wrong map. Maps were considered military intelligence assets, a threat to national security in the wrong hands.

Kipling's novel Kim is based on the true history of how the British incrementally mapped the territory of India and neighboring regions.

Maps, and geodesy in general is still very important to militaries today. You want a fighter jet to be able to locate the carrier it started from. You want to know where the enemies are hiding and where their bunkers are so that you can shoot at them with your artillery. You want to know which bridges can endure the weight of tanks and which can't. It's no coincidence that the US military invented GPS and keeps it under its operational control.

And that in some countries, it's still a treason level offense to possess a GPS receiver. Some others have relaxed that stance, but only very recently.

Even with cell phones and the general culture changing in many of those places, the tolerance is an unofficial courtesy; the laws haven't changed and are still used against tourists when authorities get suspicious or just need an excuse for harassment.

> Maps were considered military intelligence assets, a threat to national security in the wrong hands.

Do you think that's not the case today?!

Well ones that just contain basic elevations, etc are all very available to the public now so that's no longer the case. It's true that placing critical resource locations on the map makes that the case, but that's not what OP is referring to.

Maybe for high resolution geoid / gravimetric data. But even it's starting to get publicly published. (Coincidentally starting around the time we began rolling out missile defense.)

I fear you can still get close to being executed for possessing the wrong map, for example in Israel/Palestine, Kashmir (disputed between India/Pakistan), or China/Taiwan (stating that Taipei is the capital of Taiwan can even get you in trouble _in_Taiwan. See https://www.hongkongfp.com/2015/08/10/bbc-calls-taipei-taiwa...)

It's also interesting to note that many on-line maps of China (google maps for example) are shifted off of their actual locations by a few hundred meters.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrictions_on_geographic_dat...

This is a fantastic resource, thank you. I really enjoy these old hand-drawn maps. I've collected a few myself, including a German map of the north coast of BC, Alaska and eastern Russia, including Kamchatka, unfortunately undated but I believe it's pre-sale of Alaska to the US. It's primarily an ethnographic map made for the "Zeitschrift fur Ethnologie", or Journal of Ethnology, which I guess was a German anthropological journal. The various Inuit groups are represented in different colours.

Another nice one is labeled "Polar Regions of British Nth America" and is principally of Canada. It dates from 1839 and shows Devon Island connected to Greenland, amongst other inaccuracies. It's beautifully drawn and quite small, perhaps 20 cm a side.

"It's primarily an ethnographic map made for the "Zeitschrift fur Ethnologie", or Journal of Ethnology, which I guess was a German anthropological journal."

Still is, I think.

https://www.dgska.de/zeitschrift-fuer-ethnologie/

Still is. http://www.reimer-mann-verlag.de/controller.php?cmd=detail&t...

Nice, thanks for this. I wonder if they’d like their map back.

Did you purchase these maps from a specialty shop, a dealer, or just grubbing around at flea markets?

Years ago, there was a map shop in Vancouver that sold a small collection of old maps. I managed to snag a few before it inevitably went out of business.

If such maps or the aesthetics of copper engravings interest you, I strongly suggest to have a look at Matthaeus Merian's "Topographia Germaniae" [0].

Some highlights:

Prague (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b6/Pr...)

Vienna (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/df/Statt_Wi...)

Strasbourg (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/eb/To...)

Nuremberg (Map: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/15/De_Meria..., View: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ae/De_Meria...)

Lübeck (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c7/Lv...)

Frankfurt (Map: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8e/De_Meria..., View: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/fa/De...)

[0] https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Topographia_Germaniae

The site: https://militarymaps.rct.uk/

I know we are not supposed to discuss dead comments, but Gusen is some kind of odd propaganda bot, right? Those comments are bonkers.

There are some great maps[1] of the 1684 Siege of Vienna which IMHO is the most undertold story in European history.

The desperate plight of Vienna, with only 15,000 troops defending against the 150,000 strong Ottoman army. The creation of a relief coalition in only 6 days.

The arrival of the 70,000 strong Polish and allies army under Sobieski and their decision to attack immediately at daylight the next day. The attack of the Ottomans on the walls of Vienna in an attempt to breach it before they were attacked.

The day long battle, with Sobieski holding back his famed cavalry. And then, at 6:00pm the biggest cavalry charge in history - 18,000 horses led by the 3000 of the heavy Winged Hussars which had spent the past 70 developing their reputation as the best heavy cavalry in Europe.

AFIAK there isn't even a decent novelisation of this story, which I find astonishing.

[1] https://militarymaps.rct.uk/ottoman-habsburg-wars-1521-1791/...

For those that prefer their stories in a Swedish power metal music video format: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuJk6MDUZFM

That music video got its visuals from the movie The Day of the Siege.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1899285/

Which, based on nl's description of the events, I think I need to watch.

Some fascinating maps on there - e.g. this one of the 1746 Battle of Culloden, the last pitched battle on Britain:

https://militarymaps.rct.uk/other-18th-19th-century-conflict...

For anyone else unfamiliar with the term: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitched_battle

Do they have an API or does someone have an archive with all the pictures?

One of the other frontpage things pointed at this: https://robottini.altervista.org/cartesio-low-cost-cartesian...

and now I want to build it and find some nice maps to have it draw and then see if I can build boardgames on them!

IANAL but the prominent

   (c) The Royal Collection Trust

overlaid on each map caught my attention.

Shouldn't these very old maps be in the public domain?

It'll be the digital (and any physical) reproductions that will be subject to copyright, not the maps themselves.

No. At least in the US, an exact replication of a public domain work is also public domain. They may be claiming public domain, but it wouldn't hold up in a US court of law (no idea about elsewhere).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc.,_v._R....

Now, if someone makes a database of digitized old books in some particular category, whose compilation required creativity and originality, that work might fall under copyright. But just a digitized book? No.

The usual touchstone case in this area in the US is Bridgeman v. Corel, which came down on the side of "no copyright" for these kinds of reproductions:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel....

That's an appeals-court level decision so there's some wiggle room to claim that the rule on reproductions isn't totally settled. UK law is a little different and, to my knowledge, somewhat less hostile than US law to a "sweat of the brow" argument about the labor and skill required to produce something possibly bringing about copyright protection. Still, my understanding is that the current situation in the UK is much the same as in the US.

Regardless, it's still fairly common for museums and archives in the US and UK to assert copyright in scans and reproductions they produce, even if they generally don't ultimately follow through in court. There was a high-profile dust-up between the National Portrait Gallery of London and a user who was uploading high-resolution images to Wikimedia Commons, which resulted in much saber-rattling but no actual case.

Simply making the content unavailable and requiring agreement to a contract or set of terms seems to be the main method currently in use for these institutions to try to maintain their revenue streams from reproductions.

My guess is that the "revenue streams" from reproductions of public domain content are (1) negligible to begin with, and (2) might even be higher for many institutions under a permissive policy, since paying for the institution's implied endorsement would still be a highly-sought-after signal for most serious commercial reusers. Many institutions are starting to realize this, even in Europe where these overblown copyright claims used to be even more common.

I think this is true mostly, but not all cultural heritage institutions are on the same page here. I work on some sites that serve the cultural heritage community, and last time I talked to some of our larger contributors, reproduction rights were still a revenue stream that was large enough to want to maintain. For some contributors, it is not worth their time to try and deal with licensing.

Interesting...and looks like I'm wrong. I'd always assumed digital reproductions held copyright.

Sadly I can't edit my comment now to acknowledge my erroneous assumption. zerocrates comment below links to the Bridgeman case which has in fact a section on UK copyright:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel...

Interestingly the RCT "Copyright" page:

https://www.rct.uk/about/policies/copyright

...is fairly specific about restrictions on "Commercial" use of their images, not non-commercial use which by omission in their statement would suggest you're free to do as you wish:

Any commercial use of the images on this website is subject to written permission from Royal Collection Trust and the applicable Licence Terms and Conditions displayed on this site. In particular, but without limitation, no images may be reproduced, communicated to the public, distributed, re-used or extracted from this website for commercial use (including without limitation any storage, reproduction, linking or indexing for the purposes of any search engines) without the prior written consent of Royal Collection Trust.

Whether that would hold up in court, I've no idea.

The National Library of Scotland (a tremendous resource for old maps) has a pretty decent and fairly clear statement on re-use/licensing:

https://maps.nls.uk/copyright.html

Again, Commercial Use of some sources (via third parties such as Ordnance Survey) mentions you need to get permission.

some folks have claimed that digital reproductions have their own rights (esp. if cleaned up or "digital development" of negatives was done) , but I've heard that called "copyfraud" -- it is a big issue in the cultural heritage institutions who want license fees as a revenue stream. Most publishers are willing to pay for reproduction rights, even if they are not needed, just to be on the safe side.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyfraud

Another wrinkle is that the copyright clock traditionally starts at the time a work is published. So, unpublished manuscripts are not necessarily in the public domain, even if they were written 100s of years ago. If these were the King's personal maps, and just now published, they might still be under copyright.

Some countries have a special copyright status for a 'first' publication of unpublished historical content, called editio princeps. But the conditions for that to apply are somewhat stringent; a widely-copied manuscript would be considered to have been 'published' for example. In the US, AIUI, copyright on an unpublished work would run out 120 years after creation.

> So, unpublished manuscripts are not necessarily in the public domain, even if they were written 100s of years ago.

This may well be the case in the UK, but this assertion would likely not apply in the US, for multiple reasons. For one thing, manuscripts that have been displayed in a museum would be counted as published. Also, in the US copyright expires 120 years following creation, at the very latest.

Has anyone had success making prints of maps from image files? Some of these would look great hung up on a wall.

Yes. 5 years ago, I printed the Turgot map of Paris roughly 1.5 meters wide from this file:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b9/Turgot_m...

It is hanging in my living room and look great.

Interesting that this "map" of the Royal Navy in 1804 looks so much like the infographics that are popular today.

https://militarymaps.rct.uk/napoleonic-wars-1803-15/royal-na...

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