Interactive maps of Europe in the 19th century | Hacker News Reader

Interactive maps of Europe in the 19th century

maps.arcanum.com

190 pointslorenzfx34 comments

10 EUR per tile? Shouldn't such maps be in public domain already?

It's odd how differently countries treat their cultural heritage. Poland, for example, has published a lot of archival materials in public domain [1]. But this is not the case for Austrian state, which, I guess, owns large fraction of the maps on OP website (Austro-Hungarian Empire). They also charge large sums for using materials from their digital archives.

[1] https://polona.pl/

Thank you very much for that link, it's a god-sent. I've managed to find an early 1850s plan of my city, Bucharest [1], which is quite rare in itself, at least I don't know of any such good rendering available on the Internet (or I didn't use to know until now). I've also been able to find other really nice resources about my country, Romania.

[1] https://polona.pl/item/planul-bukurestului-ridikat-tras-chi-...

Folks interested in historical maps of arbitrary places should also try searching the David Rumsey collection, which is all freely available online:

https://www.davidrumsey.com

I was researching maps for a certian area that belonged to the kingdom of Bavaria, which is included in OP's link. That map is also almost completely available and accessable from germany's offical geoservices via WMS, which is nice. And the accuracy of these maps is astounding. (Whereas the 18. century map is mostly inaccurate in details) They are military maps, so it makes sense.

However I dug deeper into the history of these (bavarian) maps and suprisingly found that there are a lot more maps that built the basis of the military maps. And boy, they are uncannily accurate. And of course scattered among archives, survey offices and libraries.

I even managed to find a map with the exact locations of buildings that are still standing today. Manually georefercing them showed that they are often only a few centimeters off.

And to get back to this comment: I had a hard time finding a general map from the same area. And when i found it the office that held the records. They also didn't hold one map, but several maps that were made over the years. However they wwere extremly expensive and I was even bombarded with several limitations. E.g. if I'd publish it in a journal I MUST notify the office with details.

Parent comment is right, that they should be in the public domain, however some administrative bodies still believe that they should be guarded as state secrets, probably because these maps were the basis of tax registers and most of the land units on these maps are still the same 150 years later. Even though the same office publishes WMS data of todays situation for free on their website.

Depending on the country, you can find many public domain maps, scanned, in the Library of Congress.

Here's the famous 18th century Cassini map of France (first modern triangulated map, three generations of Cassinis worked on it)

https://www.loc.gov/item/gm72002942/

The LoC graciously scanned and hosts this copy. Arcanum also sells it: https://maps.arcanum.com/en/map/europe-18century-firstsurvey...

You'll notice that the Arcanum map is scanned, tiled, and hosted as a modern web scrollable map.

The Cassini map is available in a scrollable format from the French government itself : https://www.geoportail.gouv.fr/donnees/carte-de-cassini

Furthermore the site hosts a number of historical and modern maps that are all geographically indexed and can be overlaid.

Cool, I've seen higher resolutions of my house (well technically the previous building as it was rebuilt in 1962) from 1890 on https://maps.nls.uk/os/6inch-england-and-wales/, but not the rest of Europe

I find the map of Greece being written in German (published in Vienna) amusing

Some interesting things in London

1) The railway line from Waterloo East to Waterloo main is still in place

2) No Tower Bridge

3) The Circle/District/Metropolitain lines are shown

4) The Olympia-ShepherdsBush-Hammersmith loop is shown

5) There's a farm north of Shepherds Bush (where White City and the 1908 Olympics were held shortly after)

6) London in the north generally stops around Zone 2

> 2) No Tower Bridge

Was just looking at it before I returned here. Find word LONDON, to the right look for A100 next to St. Katherine's Pier.

221b is NE of the word, in Marleybone, between A41 and Regent's Park. Resolution too poor to see if the statue's there yet. https://osm.org/go/euu4Hniql

It's not there

https://imgur.com/LgUmHGJ

What are you on about with A100? The UK road numbering system was a post-war thing

They have also 18th century [1]. Just bit smaller area.

[1] https://maps.arcanum.com/en/map/europe-18century-firstsurvey...

One interesting difference between the 19th and 18th centuries in Europe is that the European nations qua "nations" didn't exist until the 19th century.

I think the national library of Scotland has a site which allows you to navigate around and select a large set of historic maps. It’s fascinating charting the growth of places like Glasgow over the last couple of centuries.

Here is the link: https://maps.nls.uk/

A fascinating resource.

Can't agree more. I have wasted so many hours using their side-by-side maps:

https://maps.nls.uk/geo/explore/side-by-side/#zoom=13&lat=51...

Curiously enough, it took me a while to find the current Republic of Moldova on this map. The country labeled "Moldavia" as shown is only about 50% of the old Principality of Moldova - from the 14th century until 1812 it used to extend about the same amount to the east - called Basarabia - and well into what this map labels as the Russian empire.

And while the depicted Moldavia region joined others to create the modern day Romania, its eastern part, Basarabia, only managed to rejoin Romania for 20 years in the late 19th century, and 20 years in the early 20th century, before being annexed yet again, until it finally became the modern Republic of Moldova. In the process, 50% of the native Romanian population was purposefully displaced.

The side effects of this occupation are very much felt even today. Moldovans still struggle with their national identity. Politicians frequently engage in bike-shedding and love to stir up 'state language' controversy to detract from real economic issues, corruption and poverty. There's enormous Russian influence over the region and interests to keep the country busy being poor and in turmoil.

These days I fear that if Russia invades Ukraine, they won't stop at the border with the Republic of Moldova, they'll annex Basarabia like they did in 1812 and again in 1940, to restore the 'glorious' Russian empire of the 19th century.

> they'll annex Basarabia like they did in 1812 and again in 1940, to restore the 'glorious' Russian empire of the 19th century

How far into Ukraine do you think they would manage/are likely to go? Odessa oblast has some Russian ethics, but I'm not at all sure they are enough to allow for the kind of dynamics that took place further East.

And if Russia can't/doesn't want to hold Odessa, it will definitely not go as far as Basarabia.

The previous Iron Curtain territory (there was a reason for it). They'd like to push control up to the Carpathian mountains to give a huge military power concentration boost. Their legitimate completely flat border from Estonia to the Sea of Azov is a tough dispersal in bad times. This would only happen under worst case scenario of global disarray.

With the caveat that my knowledge of Ukraine is rather weak (I've only been to Kiev once), my best guess it that they won't be able to conquer all of it - Ukraine is huge, so eventually I think it would be split it into two parts.

Within Ukraine there's a decent divide between those who are pro Russian in the south and those who would like to retain the Ukrainian language and culture, mostly in the north, so it wouldn't surprise me if Russia manages to retain the southern part, but ends up having trouble with North-Western Ukraine.

That said, this isn't a game of Civ and I hope the Ukrainian people won't have to go through that horror.

Interesting, thanks for drawing attention to the partitioning of Moldavia. I have a superficial understanding of the medieval history of the regions of Wallachia, Moldavia and Transylvania, and their various annexations by their warring neighbours again and again, but wasn't aware of just how much post-Soviet/Russian Empire conflict still seems to be stirring, especially in Bessarabia.

Wow, my home region (Ore Mountains in Germany) is basically Google Maps quality down to unique buildings (ok not quite, more like "Google Maps when it was new"). At least judging by the historical buildings that still exist.

Are they sure the French map is from 1836? It looks like Paris has its petite ceinture railway (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemin_de_fer_de_Petite_Ceintu...) which was built in the late 1850s.

If you look closely, you can see that the railway lines were later drawn onto the map by hand:

https://maps.arcanum.com/en/map/europe-19century-secondsurve...

I just found out my neighbor village dropped a letter in it's name in the last 150 years, nice.

My family dropped a letter from its name in the same time - apparently because some Church of Scotland minister thought he knew how to spell the family name better than my ancestors did. My elder brother still has the family bible with the spelling change in place.

Interesting to see the bit of Italy north of Trento that was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. They used both the German and Italian names for places where both were in common use, which trails off towards Bozen (Botzen on this map).

You can see how 'mixed up' things were in the Istria area as well, with lots of Italian names mixed up with Slavic ones.

Vienna is almost unrecognizable. I knew they did a lot of work on the Danube over the centuries, but wow.

Very nice. Unfortunately the resolution is not that high when you zoom in a bit. Not all details are really visible. (This is not because of bad quality but just because of resolution.)

You might have to wait for it to load. I'm now looking at Moldova (where I come from), and it took ~10s to load a full resolution map. All details except the very very tiny ones are legible

Richmond park (London) had a lot more roads through it as far as I can see. Many are not even visible now. At least some things have improved.

I'm missing a bit more info about the sources. What the heck is "Russia (1972)"? (excluding moscow btw)

Fascinating to see the characteristic layout of my street in London hasn't changed in the slightest!

Ordnance survey of Scotland, 1890. Holy crap, the effort represented there.

I love the way the hills are drawn. Very different from the now common hillshade + isolines, but very clear nonetheless

Prussian cities have no street names. There must be better sources.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com