The London Underground turns 150. See how the tube map has changed | Hacker News Reader

The London Underground turns 150. See how the tube map has changed

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41 pointsdonohoe43 comments

I'm always amazed at how modern the world was in 1890-1910. I recently learned that the train line I take to work every morning (Metro North's New Haven line) was electrified in 1907!

At Disneyland, Tomorrowland has an exhibit the Carousel of Progress. While it's ostensibly about the advances in home technology over the last 100 years, what really strikes you is how quickly it becomes recognizably modern. Electric lighting and cooking became common in the 1920's, and by 1940 you've got a dishwasher, television, etc.

It isn't that 1890 was modern; 2010 is lacking in advancement.

Please. The internet and cell phones have changed the world as much as any technology since the light bulb.

Your world. Which is much smaller than THE world.

That said, here are some things invented after the lightbulb that have had more effect than cell phones and the internet.

Aeroplanes. Transistors. Integrated circuits.

And dwarfing them all, the sulfa drugs.

I'm not sure that this is true. The light bulb changed the fabric of society down to the hours people kept. The internet has mostly made it more convenient to do things you already did. Instead of calling your brother on his birthday, you leave him a facebook message. Instead of sending a fax or telex, you send an e-mail. But people largely still work the same way in the same patterns.

OP said SINCE the lightbulb - it is acknowledged that the lightbulb had more effect :) As you say, it fundamentally changed almost everything. It made it possible to safely, reliably put light where before there was no light. The light of burning things is, by comparison to electric light, horrifically dangerous, expensive, unreliabe and inconsistent. Electric light not only enabled people to do things in the hours of darkness, but to create new places to work in, or just to store things, or to create new objects and mechanisms using the new ability to put light anywhere we wanted whenever we wanted (could you imagine trying to inspect the interior of some complex internal component of some huge fantastic construction using a gaslight, or a lump of burning wood?). The tiny bulb in a torch (US - flashlight) is so ubiquitous, but so incredibly useful. So many industries suddenly became so much better, so much safer. Mining, transportation. Lightbulbs touched everything, and created not just new ways of doing things, but made the impossible possible.

So far, the internet and cell phones have not been nearly so revolutionary, but the OP did say "since" :)

This is as true as saying that the automobile let you do what a horse could do, only easier and faster.

On the surface, it's seemingly true, but in reality the details make all the difference. Affordability, for example. Horses were expensive, not everyone owned them, whereas cars could be subject to manufacturing efficiencies and eventually became cheap enough to allow mass ownership. Also, the convenience and inexpensiveness of taking a long trip by car utterly transformed the world.

Similarly, the world is growing far more connected through the internet than it ever was via phone, fax, telex, etc. Speaking personally, prior to the internet I didn't have a lot of interaction with people living outside of my hometown, but today it's not unusual for me to communicate with friends living all over North America and Australia and to talk with acquaintances and strangers all over the world.

Also, people are not working in the same patterns. A significant number of people who do knowledge work have gone to work for themselves, which would not have been so easy pre-internet. Similarly, through inventions like ebay, etsy, crowd funding, self-publishing of music and books, and so forth a lot of people are finding it easier to switch to creative careers. How many lives have been changed by people changing their careers through sites like kickstarter and indiegogo? What percentage does that represent of all people who have made similar changes to their lives enabled by the internet and modern technology?

... in the US

I'm ostensibly responding to everyone here that posted a comment similar to your own.

I've been traveling for 8 months now, nearly 6 of which were through a half dozen in South America, including the poorest, Bolivia. The Internet and computers have had huge impacts on the day to day lives of the people in these countries. Wifi is widely available almost everywhere, the only time we had some difficulty was in a city on the precipice of the deep Amazonian jungle.

As I understand it, the idea of hard currency is being challenged in many African countries due to proliferation of cell phones and other technologies facilitated by the Internet. Social networks are allowing for evasion of government censorship in middle eastern and Asian countries.

So, I guess, what I'm saying is, I challenge the premise of any comment that relegates the benefits of computers and the Internet to first world, western countries.

I was commenting more on the dishwashers and TVs in the 40s. My grandmother grew up in a rural area of Eastern Slovakia in the 40s and they didn't have a dishwasher or TV. Probably because they didn't have electricity. They didn't even have proper floors, just dirt.

That's one of the greatest developments of modern time - the extent to which modern technology is everywhere. While TV took ~30 years to become widespread, even poor people in developing countries are using computers and smartphones not much different to people in western countries. 30 years of technological difference shrunk to 2 at most.

Don't forget that it was true only for a very small percent of Earth's land/people. For example in Eastern Europe - Bulgaria, electricity reached smaller towns and villages during the 1950s and 60s.

Even Americans didn't have electrification or indoor plumbing everywhere in the 1930's.

Even seemingly modern, developed countries didn't have indoor plumbing in the 1930s.

My parents grew up in houses on modern (for the time) housing estates in England in the 1950s/1960s without indoor plumbing. Though it was indoor in the sense that the shed was attached to the house out back, but the plumbing was not inside the house until the late 1960s.

The number of dwellings in Japan with flush toilets increased from 45.9% in 1978 to 83.0% in 1998.

* Statistics Bureau, Japan.

I think this is one of the most interesting parts of the old subway - http://www.urban75.org/london/leinster.html

There are fake houses in London, with very real looking facades, that were built so that the steam from the engines could escape.

Epic.

Not related, but also interesting. The railway U1 in Berlin going right through a house. Amazing when you are in front of the house's door. http://www.bahnbilder.de/1024/-hausdurchfahrt-im-uebergangsb...

In case any New Yorkers are interested, historical maps (minus any textual guide to them) is available here:

http://www.nycsubway.org/wiki/Historical_Maps

Sometimes I wonder what the NYC subway system would look like if it was centrally administered from the start, like the Tube was. NYC definitely has made some choices that look strange today.

> Sometimes I wonder what the NYC subway system would look like if it was centrally administered from the start, like the Tube was. NYC definitely has made some choices that look strange today.

I'm new in NYC. Could you elaborate on this?

The subway was three (?) different companies until the seventies or somewhere in that vicinity.

Like commuter overland routes still are in Japan today I think.

Or even the Tokyo Subway, which is two systems (Tokyo Metro and Toei).

Only until 1940.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_New_York_City_Su...

The subway system used to be operated by different companies. To simplify greatly- the letter lines were a different company (BMT) to the number lines (IRT). That's why there are so few stations that allow you to transfer between letters and numbers, and why trains on lettered lines cannot run on numbered tracks, and vice versa. It's also why we have countdown clocks on numbered lines and not lettered ones- they use different technology.

There are even stories of one company intentionally obstructing the other. If I recall correctly, the BMT built track that they had no intention of using, just so that they could block the IRT from extending the 7 line beyond Times Square.

Sometimes I wonder why the subways fascinate me as much as they do.

> It's also why we have countdown clocks on numbered lines and not lettered ones- they use different technology.

This actually came up in a different thread, where I asked how the old technology could possibly prevent something as simple as countdown clocks. I never got a good answer when I said

> I don't care about the signal towers or how old the system is. The point is that the technology for identifying the location and speed of a few hundred giant hunks of metal moving around on fixed tracks is trivial and does not need to interact with the old system (or humans) at all. Just tag each train with a few RFID's, and stick in a few hundred miles of wiring into the tunnels.

>I mean, are you telling me for a 100 million dollars this couldn't be done?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4979988

The context was this:

> “The existence of this sleek digital interface barely hints at the investment that had to be made in terms of hardware and infrastructure to make this enormous public benefit a reality,” said Thomas F. Prendergast, President of MTA New York City Transit. “Think of Subway Time as the small tip of a huge iceberg. For a product of this quality to be available on the lettered lines, we will need to commit hundreds of millions of dollars and years of dedicated effort.”

> Automatic Train Supervision installation began in 1997. The system was activated in segments, with the substantial completion taking place in 2008. The project cost $20.8 million per year over 11 years, or $228.3 million in total.

http://www.mta.info/news/stories/?story=921

I find this baffling. Can anyone shed some light?

I imagine (though I have no idea) that those millions of dollars are not used on countdown clocks- they're used to centralise all train operations in one building, with countdown clocks as a side-effect benefit.

IRT trains can run on BMT/IND tracks, but you'd have to jump off them if they stopped at a station.

The Tube wan't centrally administrated. It was formed by the nationalisation of desperate private companies [1]. This process continues even to this day with current right-wing, free market ideologist Boris Johnson allowing London Overground Lines to join the network [2]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Underground#Nationalisat... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Overground

Boris Johnson is an opportunist, he'll believe in anything you want if there's a vote in it. He spunked couple hundred million on replacing bendy buses ahead of the renewal cycle because it made good headlines.

Pretty much nobody but Ken Livingstone liked the bendy buses. Boris has a lot of faults, but criticising him for listening to his constituents seems a bit rough.

Yes but the fiscally prudent thing to do would have been to wait 4-5 years for them to need replacement then replace them with something else. They were just unpopular and prone to fare dodging not dangerous. There were a few reports of cyclists being killed, but for that money. You could have saved more lives by, say, installing platform edge doors in busy tube stations. Edit: And I dont think it was ever conclusivly shown that they actually killed more cyclists per mile than normal buses.

I'm afraid you are mistaken about the underground always being centrally managed. It was built by a variety of private companies in the beginning, and they did not come under one umbrella until 1933.

made a small js to display all the gif/jpgs inline on that page.

https://gist.github.com/4494373

London Underground is notorious for the sometimes ridiculous interchanges because it's an amalgamation of private lines that was built with little to no thought about locating stations for different lines close to each other..

That webpage is a nightmare to use. I love almost any kind of maps though, so it was worth it.

+1. this is the worst user experience I've had in a long time.

Care to elaborate? I think it's a well-worked responsive design. The only annoyance is the navigation bar flitting up and down on scroll.

Well for example Ghostery! kills all functionality, when killing all trackers on the page. ;-)

I just see a spinner. I give up.

I have 4 scroll bars on the right side of the page, and i need to use the second one to scroll through the blog post. A normal stationary blog that could be implemented in one tiny html file with 10 images.

And even when I allow all scripts (which load from 10+ domains) and cookies, and use the site as they intended it still is a nightmare. While scrolling to view the entire post I am attacked by some weird top menu bar that grows and somehow more stories are added to the same page making the post I'm reading even tougher to get to.

Huh, bit of a gap between 1974 and 2002, you don't get to see the Jubilee line prior to its extension south of the river.

The light grey zone coloration (In the last 2 maps) is hugely distracting in these images, though I don’t remember that being the case in real life. Perhaps it’s an artifact of the size.

Bit of a gap between 2002 and 2013. That's just lazy. It couldn't be too hard to find more maps.

Mornington crescent!

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