Interplace

Hello Interactors,

We’re learning every day just how embedded racism is in the workings of American polity. My recent posts have picked on the history and influence of America’s cadastral and topographic cartography. Today I weave together European scientific determinism, early ‘big data’ authoritarianism, and White supremist cartography.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

CARL IN ALBUS PHYSICUS (CARL THE WHITE SCIENTIST)

Our world is filled with data. There’s so much data that we came up with huge word to describe it – Big. Ok, a three letter word that happens means a lot. ‘Big Data’ is a big deal these days. We can’t seem to ever get enough data. More data seems to be more better. Scientists have been collecting, categorizing, and classifying data for hundreds of years. It’s the basis of the scientific method and our appetite for more data doesn’t seem to be waning.

One of the most influential scientists in the early days of systematic data collection and classification was the father of taxonomy, Carl von Linné. He wrote in Latin, so he liked to go by Carolus Linnaeus. The word taxonomy has Greek origins: taxis (arrange) nomia (method). The method of arranging. Not to be confused with taxidermy. That’s the arrangement of skin. Linneaus was a Swedish botanist, zoologist, and taxonomist who wrote a very popular book called Systema Naturae. The first edition came out in 1735, but the one that really caught steam and spread around the world was the tenth edition in 1758. That was the one where he dedicated five of the over two thousand pages to the following taxonomy of homo sapiens:

* Homo americanus

* Homo europaeus

* Homo asiaticus

* Homo africanus

As you can see, he assigned a geographic association to each name: America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. It was commonly believed by Christian scientists during these times that humans were shaped by God to fit in their environment; including the shape of their bodies, color of their skin, behavior, and how they governed themselves. As Linneaus often said, "God created, Linnaeus organized." Brad observes that Carl also spoke in the third person. Here’s how he organized and described God’s homo sapiens indigenous to their land:

“Americanus: Red, choleric and straight. Straight, black and thick hair; gaping nostrils; [freckled] face; beardless chin. Unyielding, cheerful, free. Paints himself in a maze of red lines. Governed by customary right.

Europaeus: White, sanguine, muscular. Plenty of yellow hair; blue eyes. Light, wise, inventor. Protected by tight clothing. Governed by rites.

Asiaticus: Sallow, melancholic, stiff. Blackish hair, dark eyes. Stern, haughty, greedy. Protected by loose garments. Governed by opinions.

Africanus: Black, phlegmatic, lazy. Dark hair, with many twisting braids; silky skin; flat nose; swollen lips; Women [with] elongated labia; breasts lactating profusely. Sly, sluggish, neglectful. Anoints himself with fat. Governed by choice [caprice].”

Linneaus ended up printing thirty editions of Systema Naturae all the way up to 1793. His geographically assigned taxonomy of humans became the defining standard of how the world came to categorize people. The word used to describe the taxonomy of the physical and behavioral characteristics Linneaus assigned to homo sapiens dates all the way back to the 1500s. That word is ‘race’.  

BIG DATA, BIG COUNTRY, BIG MAPS, BIG PROBLEM

Given the geographic binding to race, it should come as no surprise that cartographers in Europe and America were quick to map these races. I spent the month of April talking about the history of America’s survey system and the gridding of the land for purposes of taxation and White colonial settlement. It started with Jefferson’s Land Ordinance act of 1785. But another American survey was started in 1790 that has also resulted in the creation of maps. It’s even written into the U.S. Constitution. It’s the census survey.

Just as America was the first to yank large scale cadastral mapping out of Roman times to build an empire, the U.S. was the first to utilize the census to reapportion government representation as the population grew. The U.S. House of Representatives grew steadily more or less in a straight line from the first census in 1790 to just before 1920. It’s been flat ever since. Despite the fact our population has more than tripled since then. I know big government is very popular these days, but clearly we’re not all duly represented in Washington D.C.

Nineteen-twenty also marked the year the sagging line of rural dwellers crossed the climbing line of urban dwellers. Today over eighty percent of the U.S. population lives in urban areas and that number is expected to grow exponentially. Another surge in U.S. population occurred in the mid 1800s as land across the country became increasingly easy to settle. As I mentioned in a previous post, a pioneering White settler could approximate a survey of 40 acres of land to call their own in under a day.

But the influx of foreigners was troubling to many. The complexion of the country was changing rapidly. By the late 1800s, the census bureau was pressed to not just count but also classify, diagram, and map the myriad of ethnicities flooding the country from Europe and Asia. Many of whom were migrant laborers building the nation’s railroad. Government statisticians scrambled to find ways to accurately define and model the data. As cartography historian Jeremy Crampton notes,

“The superintendent of the 1870 and 1880 U.S. Census, economist and statistician Francis Amasa Walker, explicitly remodeled its data collection to track what he saw as worrying immigration trends.”

You could argue the 1890 census was the beginning of ‘big data’ in America. The eleventh census was the first to be tabulated with punch cards. A gentleman named Herman Hollerith invented the punched card tabulating machine in 1884. He went on to found a company called the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company. Thirteen years later in 1924 it was renamed ‘International Business Machines’ or IBM.

One of the many holes in those 1890 punch cards was for ‘race’. The census in America has had a long history of changing ethnic classifications every census or two. The first census in 1790 had three: ‘Free white females and males, other free persons, and slaves.’ In 1820 ‘free people of color’ was added.  Then, in 1850 back to three, but a different three: ‘Black, Mulatto, and White’. And then, in 1890 it was: ‘Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Black, Mulatto, Qaudroon, Octaroon, and White.’ Quadroon and Octaroon were considered one quarter or one eighth African and the rest European blood.

All this data needed to be communicated efficiently. Not just to the government, but to teachers too. These census publications play a key role in teaching students across the land a particularly one-sided quantitative narrative of American history. To do so effectively, this big data needed much clarity, so they turned to the people best suited for the job; cartographers.  

Not just any cartographer, but the father of American cartography, Henry Gannett. I introduced Gannett in last week’s post. He had pioneered the quadrant topographic survey system and then joined the census for the 1880 survey. He introduced a regional division scheme for the census that corresponded to the newly formed counties thus aligning census data to politics. The revised scheme looked to the past and to the future. It allowed for data to be compared to previous census collections and is still in use today.

TAKING STOCK OF AMERICA’S STOCK

The 1890 census was the second survey to include maps and the first to be signed by Gannett. The Library of Congress has Gannett’s entire Statistical Atlas of the United States Based upon the Results of the Eleventh Census online. I highly encourage people to flip through the pages and zoom in on the illustrious maps, diagrams, and charts Gannett and his team prepared. The deep coloration of lithographic pigmentation that comprise the overlapped layering of isarithmic, choropleth, and dasymetric maps saturate the thirsty, bleached white paper making digital cartography look flat and lifeless.

This census report is filled with statistical information and analysis. Part one covers gender, ethnicity, race, birth origins, parentage, schools, military, voting, marriage status, and family dwellings. Part two looks at age, school attendance, illiteracy, occupations, and citizenship. Piles of punch cards, mountains of data, and a looming worry that immigrant populations were about to tower over ‘White natives’.

Gannett’s team devised a simple diagram to communicate the magnitude of the tower. They made an area chart showing ethnic and racial categories on the horizontal axis and time on the vertical. The category names chosen and listed along the bottom were: ‘Colored’, ‘Native stock’, ‘British’, ‘Irish’, ‘German’, ‘Scandinavian’, ‘Canadian’, ‘Poles’, ‘Hungarian’, ‘Italian’, and ‘Others’. Forming their own sort of taxonomy, they collapsed the European categories into a larger category called, ‘Foreign stock’.

The resulting area chart then compares ‘Foreign stock’ (both newly immigrated and settled), ‘Native stock (these are descendants of original European colonial settlers – mostly British), and ‘Colored’. True Indigenous ‘Native stock’ of this land were not counted in the census until 1860, but only if they had ‘renounced tribal rules’.  

The data runs from 1790 at the top (the nation’s first census) to 1890 at the bottom, the date of the eleventh census. The overall shape of the chart is what you’d expect. It’s narrow at the top and grows wider toward the bottom. It takes the shape of a tall, skinny mountain comprised of three distinct bell-bottomed vertical bands. The mountain top includes two of these bands, ‘Native stock’ and ‘Colored’ with ‘Native stock’ dominating. These are descendants of original White colonial settlers and their slaves. The British descendants of my long lost grandpa, Jonas Weed, would have checked the ‘Native stock’ box on their census survey.

The ‘Foreign stock’ vertical band doesn’t show up on this mountain of census data until around 1835. My Scottish, Irish, and German descendants would have checked this box. The total number of ‘Foreign stock’ grew exponentially from 1835 to 1890 and this worried the dominant ‘Native stock’. This is why census statisticians modeled the data in a way that Gannett and his team could visualize it. They wanted to get a handle where these folks were settling and in what numbers. So Gannett made maps too.

Some of the concern with immigrants wasn’t just their burgeoning population growth, it was the growing sentiment that they were not as “pure” as the White descendants of the original Anglo-Saxon colonizers. And the pairing of race to cartography and the mass distribution to schools nationwide helped spread this belief. Including the American Geographical Society who had been tasked since 1850 with expanding geographic knowledge across America. Again, Jeremy Crampton writes,

“…the American Geographical Society (AGS) played a significant role in promoting racial and eugenicist views. These were often part of a narrative of the threat of immigration from populations considered unhealthy, degenerate, or otherwise undesirable.”

The influence continued through to the twentieth century. The 1917 president of the Association of American Geographers was Harvard geographer and climatologist Robert DeCourcy Ward. He was also a eugenicist who cofounded the Immigration Restriction League in Boston in 1894. DeCourcy was a Mayflower descendant and he and his cofounders believed southern and eastern European immigrants were inferior to them and their fellow Anglo-Saxons. They believed the increasing presence of these immigrants was a threat to what they considered to be the ‘American way’.

Eugenicists seek to rid populations of people they deem physically and mentally unfit, unhealthy, and degenerate so their blood won’t mix with the pure bred White Anglo-Saxons. This was about the time a certain twenty-eight year German soldier, Adolf Hitler, wrote in his diary while recovering from a British mustard gas attack,

"When I was confined to bed, the idea came to me that I would liberate Germany, that I would make it great. I knew immediately that it would be realized."

WRAPPING A RACIAL TRAP INTO A MAP

The liberation of racial editorializing of the U.S. census has also being realized. In reading Gannett’s 1890 census survey I am impressed with the objectivity he and his statistician colleagues presented. It’s an impressive undertaking. But I can’t help but notice tinges of racism creeping in – at least by today’s standards. It’s racism nonetheless. Consider the section entitled: Defective, dependent, and delinquent classes. Here’s a section of their analysis of the ‘insane’.

“Of the native whites, 14 out of every 10,000 and 39 out of every 10,000 of the foreign born were insane. If these statistics are correct and complete, insanity is less prevalent among the colored and far more prevalent among the foreign born than among the native whites.

Diagram 191 illustrates the tendency toward insanity among people of different nationalities. It represents the number of insane person in every 100,000 of those whose parents were born in certain foreign countries.

The tendency toward insanity is greatest among the Irish, and next among the Hungarians. It is comparatively small among the Germans and British, and least of all among the Canadians.”

O Canada, with glowing hearts we see thee rise. It’s true, I’ve never met more sane people than Canadians.

Unlike the 1880 census, where physicians provided reports of the mentally ill, the 1890 did not. As a result the numbers are undercounted relative to 1880, but it begs the question; who supplied the data and how reliable was the source? And did they have a motive?

Perhaps not. After all, in reporting on the ‘feeble-minded’ they state ‘Native whites’ are number one.

“Of the native whites, the corresponding numbers were 17 (per 100,000), and of the foreign whites 10 (per 100,000), which shows, if the figures are to be trusted, that idiocy is more common among the native whites than among the colored or foreign whites, and least of all among the foreign whites.”

A bold admission! But wait, there’s more.

“The explanation of this is most probably to be found in the fact that idiocy was more fully reported by the native whites than by these other two classes.”

This indeed may be true. Self reporting surveys are notorious error prone. But then that would render all of the census data suspect and not just those data that might make you look feeble minded.

As summer approaches and echoes of George Floyd protests still echo across the nation, the section on mortality in the 1890 census reveals some curious facts regarding what were then called ‘negroes’.

“[The death rate] of the negroes is the greatest of all. The rural death rate is but 15 (per 1,000), and is greatly exceeded by the urban death rate, which among the whites is 23 (per 1,000) and among the colored 34.5. Diagram 207 shows the death rate of the white and colored in certain southern cities where the negro population is large. From this it appears that while the death rate of the whites ranges from 18-25, that of the colored ranges from 30-42, being in each case nearly double that of the whites. It is probably, however, that this proportion between the two holds in the rural districts, which are better suited to the development of the negro than the environment of large cities.”

In a refrain of Linneaus logic, it seems nineteenth century data scientists still believed race was a function of geography. Either it was inconceivable that Black Americans were victims of race violence at the hands of White supremacists who by 1890 would have been more than evident. The KKK emerged out of opposition to reconstruction. While they were suppressed legally by the federal government in the 1870s, these fearful eugenic fascists didn’t just disappear. It’s probable that many of them even found their way into southern urban police departments.

There is no mention of lynching whatsoever in the mortality section. Lynching had been occurring since the end of the Civil War and was in full swing by the time the 1890 census would have been conducted. Racial terror is one of the many factors that led to droves of Black Americans migrating north. They were literally running for their lives.

It’s easy to cherry-pick examples of racial and ethnic injustices from the annals of history. But it’s even easier to ignore it. Silence, after all, is a form of violence. It’s meaningful to me to know that the people behind those maps that were, and still are, coiled up in tensioned rolls above chalk boards and white boards that adorn our public schools were started by White supremacist eugenicists. And it wasn’t that long ago. My grandparents would have been teenagers when the American Geographical Society was shipping atlases to their one room schools in their freshly surveyed townships in Iowa.

And Brad shouldn’t give Linneaus too much grief. His taxonomy invention made Charles Darwin’s life a lot easier. But he made little to no effort to even meet these Black, phlegmatic, lazy, Dark haired, Fat lipped homo sapiens. He never traveled south of the Netherlands and never left Sweden after age 42. He wasn’t a fan of scientists visiting other countries. This quote sums it up in a paradoxically named book Carolus Linnaeus: The Swedish Naturalist and Venerable Traveler. He admonished Swedish scientist who traveled outside of Sweden telling them “[not to] cross the stream for water, and waste... money endeavoring to learn in a foreign country what... might have [been] acquired at home.”

Why risk actually observing and interacting with Indigenous Americans, Africans, or Asians? Probably because his tight protective clothing against his White, sanguine, muscular body would cause him to profusely sweat in hot and humid climates. Or perhaps his plentiful yellow hair and blue eyes would wither in the sun. He may have been a light and wise inventor, but curious and introspective he was not.

As we continue to amass infinite amounts of data and rely on statistical methods to abstract, and reason away emergent patterns. Calculations so complex that no human can ever understand them. Let’s not loose sight of our humble interactions with people and place.

Hello Interactors,

Today we’re branching into topography and the role western colonial expansion plays in the creation and articulation of our naturally occurring geography. Most of us are not very skilled at critiquing the role maps have played in shaping how we see the globe and the people on it. But I’m optimistic that when we do we can better confront the boundaries that maps have created between people and place.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

NAME THAT PLACE

I spent last April talking about how the United States was surveyed and diced in little squares that are featured in our maps today. It was a technique ripped out of ancient Rome as a way to rationally quantify space across massive swaths of land. The United States perfected gridded cartesian cadastral cartography, but drawing little lines on paper as a means of assessing, assuming, and asserting control over land had been done for centuries by European colonial settlers around the world – beginning in the Renaissance.

The Renaissance accelerated mapping. This was an era of discovering new knowledge, instrumentation, and the measuring and quantification of the natural world. Mercator’s projection stemmed from the invention of perspective; a word derived from the Latin word perspicere – “to see through.” European colonial maps were drawn mostly to navigate, control, and dominate land – and its human occupants. We have all been controlled by these maps in one way or other and we still are. Our knowledge of the world largely stems from the same perspective Mercator was offering up centuries ago. The entire world sees the world through the eyes of Western explorers, conquerors, and cartographers. That includes elements of maps as simple as place names.

Take place names in Africa, as an example. The country occupied by France until 1960, Niger, comes from the Latin word for “shining black”. Its derogatory adaptation by the British added another ‘g’ making a word we now call the n-word. But niger was not the most popular Latin word used to describe people of Africa, it was an ancient Greek derivative; Aethiops – which means “burn face”. If you replace the ‘s’ at the end with the ‘a’ from the beginning, you see where the name Ethiopia comes from.

Even the name of my home state of Iowa has dubious origins. Sure it’s named after the Indigenous tribe, the Iowa or Ioway, but the Iowa people did not call themselves that. They referred to themselves in their own language as the Báxoje (Bah-Kho-Je). They settled primarily in the eastern and south eastern part of the land we now call Iowa. Most of them were forced to relocate to reservations in Kansas and Oklahoma. It’s believed the name Iowa, came from a Sioux word – ayuhwa which means “sleepy ones.” It would be like the south winning the Civil War and then turning around and declaring the region to their north henceforth be referred to as: Yankees.

Even the word Sioux is a French cheapening of a word from the Ojbiwe people– Nadouessioux (na·towe·ssiw). The Sioux were actually a nation combined of the Dakota, Lakota, and Nakota people. They referred to themselves as Oceti Sakowin (oh-CHEH-tee SHAW-kow-we) or “Seven Council Fires”. They covered the sweeping plains of most of what we now call Minnesota; which stems from the Dakota phrase Mni Sota Makoce – “where the waters reflect the sky”. They extended south to the northwest corner of so-called Iowa and east to the more aptly named state of South Dakota.

These people were expelled from Minnesota after the Dakota War of 1862. They continue to suffer today the pains felt by America’s largest mass execution in history at the hands of none other than Abraham Lincoln. Just months after signing the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln ordered 38 Dakota and Lakota men to be hung. Dissatisfied with the pace and politics of the makeshift trial of 303 Indigenous people, he decided on his own who should live and who should die. On April 23rd, 1863 the United States declared their treaties with the Lakota and Dakota null and void, closed their reservations, and marched them off their land. It took until this year, 2021, for the United States to give a southern sliver of land back to them. And in Northern Minnesota they’re still fighting to protect the water that reflects the sky.

MAPS AND MATH FROM A MAN FROM BATH

There’s another Westernized place name just west of where the Dakota and Lakota people thrived called Gannett Peak. It’s the tallest mountain in the state of Wyoming and is part of the Bridger-Teton range. I’m sure you’ve heard of the more popular neighboring range, the Grand Teton’s; another notable (and sexist) French place name which means – ‘Big Boobs’. Gannett Peak is named after Henry Gannett – the father of American mapmaking.

Born in Bath, Maine in 1846 he went on to graduate from Harvard’s Lawrence Scientific School in 1869. After some time in the field documenting geology from the Great Lakes to the mines of Colorado he returned to Harvard for a degree in mining engineering. He spent a couple years working at the Harvard College Observatory making maps and calculating the building’s precise longitude.

He then was hired as the chief astronomer-topographer-geographer by the United States Geological and Geographical Survey of the Territories in 1872. A mouthful. Perhaps daunted by such a long name for a department charged with precision and clarity of information, the USGGST was shortened to USGS in 1779 – the U.S. Geological Society.

Some claim Gannett lobbied for USGGS in an attempt to maintain the word geographical and not just geological. If so, he was likely outvoted by his boss and prominent geologist, Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden. His book, The Great West: its Attractions and Resources gives you a clue as to why geologists were maybe more revered than geographers in the late seventeen and eighteen hundreds. After all, there’s gold in them there hills.

The study of naturally occurring geometric properties and their spatial relations over a continuous plane is the work of topology. Documenting and surveying those studies is the work of a topographer. And the artifact they generate is called a topographic map. The first large scale topographic mapping project was Cassini’s Geometric Map of France in 1792. Then, in 1802 the British followed with the highly precise topographic map of India. As I’ve noted in previous posts, the earliest surveying and mapping of the British colonies and the United States were funded and controlled by government backed private companies like the Hudson Bay Company in the 1600s and the Ohio Company of Associates in the 1700s.

IT’S UP TO YOU TO QUESTION YOUR VIEW

The topographic map of India was also directed by a British colonizing super-spreader the East India Company. They, together with the British government, had been at it for 200 years already. But in the early 1800s they were seeking accuracy. They wanted far more precise control over the Indigenous land, resources, trade, and people. The people of India are second to Africa in genetic diversity and emerged via Africa through the Indus River valley; hence the name India. This massive southeast Asian continent was first named by the Spanish or Portuguese – India is Latin for “Region of the Indus River”.

The map that the East India Company commissioned in 1802 is called the Great Trigonometrical Survey. Trigonometry had already been awhile. In 140BC its Greek inventor, Hipparchus, used it, as the British did, for spherical trigonometry – the relationship of spherical triangles that emerge when three circles wrapping around a sphere intersect to form a spherical triangle. It’s used to measure the spherical curvature of the earth and was employed with precision by the East India Company using instruments with cool names like theodolite and Zenith sector. What resulted was a map of India featuring a fine-grained triangulated lattice accurately depicting the designated borders of British claimed territories. It was also the first accurate height measurements of Mount Everest, K2, and Kanchenjunga. Those heights were surveyed by Indigenous Tibetan surveyors who were secretly hired and trained by the British. Europeans were not allowed into Tibet at the time, so the surveyors had to pretend they were just hiking. This trigonometrical triangulated technique was the first accurate measure of a section of the longitudinal arc. The same arced sections that defined the curved edges of Henry Gannett’s topographic quadrangle mapping system which he perfected seventy years later on the other side of the globe at an arc distance of roughly 8,448 miles or 13,595 kilometers.

Gannett’s career arc makes it easy to see why he figures prominently in American geography. Following is just a sampling of his contributions.

* He was the first geographer assigned to the census for the country’s tenth census survey. Gannett was responsible for drawing the first census tracts and invented the enumeration of districts based on population and geography.

* He chaired the Board of Geographic Names and later wrote a book on the history of United States place names. You can read a digitized version online. It includes a surprisingly long list of place names across the country and their origins.

* He demarcated the first 110,000 miles of national forests and served as Teddy Roosevelt’s research program director for his National Conservation Commission which projected future natural resource use.

* He helped form the National Geographic Society, Association of American Geographers, and other astronomy and geology clubs.

* He published two hundred articles on human geography, cartography, and geomorphology all while editing a handful of journals and publishing textbooks.

The topographical techniques and programs Gannett pioneered were used all the way to the 1980’s and 90’s as GPS and computers took over. As amazing as his work was, it was no match for satellite imagery, GPS, and computer imaging. The topography he painstakingly surveyed and mapped is now available to anyone with access to a computer and an internet connection.

Gannett was one of many geographers throughout the history of western colonization. Sure he was more influential than most, but they were all tasked with the same thing. Whether it was triangulating British territories in India, finessing French regions in Africa, or delineating Dutch districts in Brazil they were all measuring, mapping, and manipulating how others should see the world. It’s the paradox of mapmaking. No matter your intent, whatever line you draw will reflect the bias you bring.

Mercator was biased by perspective because that’s what the culture of his time led him to do. Gannett mapped natural occurring features of the land because the mapping of minerals and other natural resources was in high demand. Iowa was named Iowa because that’s what they knew. Even attempts to counter-map the dominance of cartesian colonial cartography can’t escape its own bias. Nobody can. But we live on a melting planet, so our days remain a few. If we’re going to survive this calamity, we must see that our thoughts are skewed. So the next you look at a map, consider its point of view. If we all do this together, we can invent a world anew.

Sources:

Henry Gannett Chapter. The History of Cartography, Volume 6: Cartography in the Twentieth Century. Edited by Mark Monmonier.

Wikipedia.

Hello Interactors,

Today I’m wrapping up this April series on the role large scale surveying played in determining how people of the United States of America interact with each other and the government. Jefferson had a vision for the country that combined his desire for agrarian expansion west, tax revenue for building a world dominating military, and his fascination with astronomical, nautical, and terrestrial mapping.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

PLUNDER THE BLUNDERER

The 2020 United States Presidential election had its fair share of electoral college drama, but nothing like the election of 1800. Thomas Jefferson was running against the incumbent John Adams to become the first non-Federalist President. It ended in an electoral college tie. To make matters worse, a flaw in the Constitution meant the run-off was between the top two vote getters. Back then, voters could vote for both the position of President and Vice President independently. Jefferson and his Vice Presidential candidate, Aaron Burr, each tied with 73 electoral college votes. Adams only had 65 and his running mate 64.  The decision on who should be president, Jefferson or Burr, fell to the House of Representatives. Hamilton, a Federalist and no friend of Jefferson, detested Burr even more and lobbied in the background with other Federalist representatives to elect Jefferson. It worked. Jefferson became the United States’ third president and the first Democratic-Republican in February of 1801.  Two years later, in 1803, Jefferson turned his attention toward another Federalist – the Surveyor General, Rufus Putnam.

I mentioned Putnam in last week’s post when he became the United States’ first Surveyor General in 1796. He was appointed by George Washington under whom he served as Colonel and Chief Engineer in the Revolutionary war. He was also the founder of the Ohio Company of Associates – the ‘associates’ were his Revolutionary War buddies. The land he was asked to survey was the very land from which his company would profit.

Jefferson, the mastermind behind the methodical gridding of land for taxation and expansion, wasn’t happy with Putnam’s work. He felt the surveys were rushed, inexact, and that Putnam was passed his prime. At 64 years old, Jefferson found Putnam to be too “set in his ways”. It was time for a new Survey General. Jefferson’s feelings for Putnam are clear in his offer letter to his replacement:

“Sir

You will be sensible of the reasons why the subject of this letter is desired to be entirely confidential for a time. Mr. Putnam the present Surveyor General in the Northern quarter is totally incompetent to the office he holds.

…it has cost Congress a great deal of time…and the removal of the blunderer has been sorely and generally desired…

…I am happy in possessing satisfactory proof of your being entirely master of this subject, and therefore in proposing to you to undertake the office…it is important to have an immediate change or we shall have the same blunders continued.”

Putnam’s replacement would be Jared Mansfield. He was just the man Jefferson needed. Mansfield was a mathematician who was skilled at using astronomy to perfect his surveying. He attended Yale in 1773, but after the death of his father became delinquent. He was accused of stealing books from the Yale library and was expelled. He landed a series of teaching jobs at small grammar schools in Connecticut, but was welcomed back to Yale. In 1787 he was awarded his degree with his original classmates.

In 1801 Mansfield published what may be the first piece of original mathematical research from an American in a collection of essays entitled, Mathematical and Physical. It covered topics in algebra, geometry, Newtonian fluxions, and nautical astronomy. The paper caught Jefferson’s attention and he appointed Mansfield to be Professor of Mathematics at West Point Military Academy. Two years later, in July of 1803, he became Surveyor General replacing the ‘blunderer’ Rufus Putnam.

MANSFEILD, MEIGS, AND TIFFIN’S TENSION

Finally Jefferson had a surveyor he could trust. Mansfield set out from New Haven, Connecticut to Marietta, Ohio with a plan. While he knew it was impossible to correct all the errors of previous surveys, he was clear that moving forward all surveys had to be conducted as he instructed. Given his position of Surveyor General also came with the title of Army Lieutenant Colonel, he was in a position to make demands.

Eight months later the Congressional Act of March 26, 1804 came into effect. This was not only the first act passed under the direction of Mansfield, but it granted him authority to extend surveying into new territories in “which Indian title had been extinguished or" shall hereafter be extinguished.” (1) It was clear the U.S. Government was intent on grabbing up Indigenous land either by treaty or by force.

Section 13 of the Congressional act of 1804 solidifies Mansfield’s authority by making it law.

“Sec . 13. And be it further enacted, That whenever any of the public lands shall have been surveyed in the manner directed by law...”.(1)

By 1804 Mansfield had documented the prescribed process in his Plan of Instructions for the District Surveyors. This is the first known written account of surveying instructions that eventually became what is known as the Manual of Surveying Instructions. Here you can read an 1855 version of that same manual. And while surveying technology has advanced, even the most recent version from 2009 contains the same purpose, scope, and technique as the original. Mansfield continued as Surveyor General until 1812 executing precision surveys with his team of deputy surveyors.

He was replaced by Josiah Meigs, but then Meigs swapped jobs two years later with Edward Tiffin who was the Commissioner of the General Land Office. Tiffin was schooled in medicine and then became a politician, but he turned out to be as skilled at surveying as Mansfield. He remained the Surveyor General for the next 14 years. He expanded on Mansfield’s instructions making them even more accurate and complete.

As the U.S. Government continued to gobble up land marching west, Tiffin had a hard time keeping up. Conflicts began to emerge between state and federally operated surveys and confusion and frustration mounted.

Tension also continued to grow between Indigenous nations and the United States. Between the country’s founding in 1776 and 1827, the United States instigated, or were involved in, ten different wars against other nations – mostly Indigenous nations. Another eleven were to follow as the Civil War approached. Friction also grew among competing White settlers during the 1820’s marking the end of unity among religious denominations and ethnicities who had banded together to survive. Even those rugged individualist pioneer settlers, many of whom found ways to coexist with Indigenous people, gave in to federal demands for land and were forced to pay taxes.

By 1829 Tiffin’s health was suffering and he was asked to step down on May 26, 1829. He passed away a little more than a month later on August 9th in his home in Chillicothe, Ohio. Then, five months later, Jared Mansfield also passed away. Though he was also living in Ohio, he passed away at age 70 during a trip back to his childhood home, New Haven, Connecticut. These two men remain legends of surveying. They contributed the bulk of the intellectual and physical contributions to realizing the vision Jefferson had set for the country 45 years prior.

IOWA: A PLACE TO GROW

In 1836 land sales by the United States government reached an all-time high of 25 million dollars, an equivalent of $712M today. States were beginning to fall into debt from infrastructure projects. But it didn’t stop people from continuing to settle land. Instead of waiting for the government to survey ‘newly discovered’ land, settlers invented their own means of squaring a chunk of property. Here’s how one pioneering farmer in my home state of Iowa described it:

“The absence of section lines rendered it necessary to take the sun at noon [to find north-south] and at evening [to find east-west] as a guide by which to run these claim lines. So many steps each way [800 double paces by 1,600] counted three hundred and twenty acres, more or less the legal area of a claim. It may readily be supposed that these lines were far from correct, but they answered all the necessary claim purposes for it was understood among the settlers that when land came to be surveyed and entered, all inequalities would be put right [by adding or subtracting land].”

When the U.S. began selling land in quarter acre lots, it became even easier to plat your own land. Squatters would simply head out at noon, take 250 steps toward the sun and jam a stick in the ground. Then, in the evening, as the sun was setting, they’d walk another 250 steps and plant another marker aligned to a point on the horizon where the sun had just dipped down. As Linklater Andro points out in his book, Measuring America:

“Even Jefferson would have approved; no system of measurement could have been more transparent, more democratic, more suited to “the calculation of everyone who possesses the first elements of arithmetic.” It was so straightforward that the citizen squatter could operate it as easily as the government surveyor.” (3)

With these two points anybody could construct a square that measured 440 yards by 440 yards completing a 40 acre lot. This was the amount of land the government had decided an average family would need to settle. It’s a unit of measurement that came to dictate so much of our economy, culture, and mythology. Growing up in Iowa, ‘Back 40’ was an idiom used to describe the far off corner of farm land; as in, “Where’s Jeff? He’s out plowin’ the Back 40.” The irrigation systems you see flying over America’s farmlands are built to encircle a 40 acre square. “40 acres and a mule” is what General Sherman ordered his army to lend to freed slaves in 1865. And before Zip Codes, mail was delivered to plat numbers inside townships: “Township 22 North, Range 4 West, Fifth Principal Meridian.”

Government surveyors found it tedious and cumbersome to measure in relatively small 40 acre increments. But it was so easy, anyone could do it. This clearly accelerated the pace of settlement across the nation. From 1800 to 1830 the U.S. government had gone from selling 300,000 acres a year to over one million. But as those Iowa squatters were counting their steps in the 1830’s things really took off. By 1837 fifty-seven million acres were sold or over eight million acres a year – an eight-fold increase in just seven years.

A SQUARE DEAL

Back in the late 1700’s Alexander Hamilton may have envisioned companies gobbling up large swaths of land for profit, but it was Thomas Jefferson’s vision of ordinary White folks seeking fame, fortune, and farming who were the victors. Both super-speculators and small-town squatters profited from land speculation – or capitalism – as speculation was called in the nineteenth century.(3) And by 1838 there was a new source of money that was more attractive than land for both the U.S. government and would-be capitalists – California gold.

Little changed with the United States’ Public Land Surveying System throughout the rest of the 1800s. But the allure of the edge of wilderness continued to beckoned people from foreign lands who had no hope of such claims in their own countries. It wasn’t for the faint of heart, but it’s easy to see how any enterprising individualist would be attracted to the prospect of property under the protection of a burgeoning democratic empire. Not just any empire, but one that made it easy for anyone to map out their own home. Just wander out into a grassy field at lunch time, look to the sky, walk toward the sun, plant a stake, and then do it again at dinner time. That’s all it took to make a square alongside your neighbor’s square. Squares that made a grid across a vast undulating terrain at the cost and pain of the Indigenous nations that remain. A grid that continues to also meticulously measure people, politics, taxes, and grain.

Hello Interactors,

Welcome to the third in a series on the role surveying and cartography played in the establishment of the United States. Today we continue further west into Ohio in the lead up to the 1800s. The U.S. government needed money to fulfill their dreams of being a global superpower. And it all hinged on Jefferson’s plan to extract money from neatly surveyed squares of land occupied by sovereign Indigenous nations who had been here for thousands of years. They were not going to give easily and they never will.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

THE SEVEN RANGES RAGE ON

“Regulating the grants of land appropriated for Military Services, and for the Society of the Brethren, for propagating the Gospel among the Heathen.”

This is the title of the Land Act of 1796. It was enacted on June 1 of that year, nearly a decade after the United States’ chief Geographer, surveyor, and mapmaker, Thomas Hutchins, had died after surveying the Seven Ranges just west of the Ohio River. The gridding and partitioning of land further west into Ohio continued to progress. The decade leading up to the Land Act was filled with increased Indigenous resistance, botched surveys by scandalous land speculators, and an eager and anxious government who needed money for their military and land from the ‘heathens’.

The Seven Ranges did not produce the kind of revenue Congress had anticipated. It was risky business for individual settlers to forge into territories of unhappy native occupants who had no allegiance to Thomas Jefferson’s cartesian adherence. The government was offering land to colonizers for cheap, at one dollar per acre, but you risked your life squatting on land unprotected from Indigenous land and water protectors. So many colonizers just waited for land speculators to buy the land so they could buy it at a discounted price – plus interest. Settlers also had to pay for the survey that proved to the government and their neighbors that it was ‘their’ land. This meant the surveys mapping their plats and townships were sloppily produced or not made at all.

Sometimes land companies would provide squatters security and protection from violence they may encounter. But it was rare. Tribal nations in this area were accustom to dealing with invaders. They had a history of negotiating with both the English and the French prior to the Revolutionary War. The French needed Indigenous allies given they were outnumbered by the British colonizers. At the beginning of the French and Indian War, in 1754, there were nearly two million in the British colonies and only 60,000 among the French colonies. The Indigenous nations would sometimes pit the English and French against each other in hopes of securing and maintaining land for themselves. After the Revolutionary War, there was a third country vying for Indigenous land, the United States. The fight for land with this nation by Indigenous nations continues to this day.

You can read more about the Land Back movement and it’s importance to future healthy interactions of people and place here.

A FOOLING OF HARD KNOX

Recall from a previous post that it was the end of the French and Indian War, in 1763, that Thomas Hutchins was working for the British army. He was surveying and securing land along the Ohio River for the British and allied Indigenous nations. Twenty one years later, in 1781, Hutchins became the chief Geographer for the United States helping Jefferson with the details of the Land Ordinance of 1784. The original plan for the dicing up of American land. And now, after platting the Seven Ranges and Hutchins’ passing in 1789, the Ohio surveying experiment had been overrun by land speculators, squatting settlers, and angered Native nations. But these fierce, proud, intelligent Indigenous nations were once again ready to negotiate alliances with the global super-powers. Including upstarts like the United States.

By this time political and military negotiations were led by a White Mohawk leader, Joseph Brant. Brant was born in Ohio to parents that had been raised with the Iroquois in the New York area. He grew up in a multi-cultural world among settling French, Irish, German, English, and his Mohawk people. He was able to speak all the dialects of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and was educated in 1761 at what was to become Dartmouth College. He rose into leadership positions both within his Mohawk tribe and the British Army and was feared by the United States due to his ability to negotiate with the British and the French. He was also a skilled warrior unafraid to fight for the rights of the people he and his parents grew up with. A fight that had already begun. The Northwest American War, also known as the Ohio War, began the year Hutchins’ set out to survey the Seven Ranges in 1785.

The allied Indigenous nations were about to do battle with Washington’s newly appointed Secretary of War, Henry Knox. The United States had secured their own Indigenous allies from the south, the Chickasaw and Choctaw. But the United States military was outnumbered. Knox had to recruit Kentucky squatters who were untrained but motivated by the prospect of land and bounty from the brown scalps of Indigenous men, women, and children. The United States was also poor. Proceeds from the land Hutchins had surveyed west of the Ohio River were barely trickling in. But Knox was determined, telling his Commander stationed at a fort in what is now Cincinnati,

“…extending a defensive and efficient protection to so extensive a frontier, against solitary, or small parties of enterprising savages, seems altogether impossible. No other remedy remains, but to extirpate, utterly, if possible, the said Banditti (bandits).”

The Miamis and Shawnees were able to fool Knox’s first attempts to destroy their villages. They would desert their grounds and then ambush the troops after watching them set fire to their homes. Defeated, Knox went on to recruit 500 more from Kentucky and issued stronger demands to his commanders. They destroyed the Miami’s largest villages and took 40 women and children hostage. They then sent word to villages up the Wabash river to surrender or risk being exterminated. Knox wrote,

“Your warriors will be slaughtered, your towns and villages ransacked and destroyed, your wives and children carried into captivity, and you may be assured that those who escape the fury of our mighty chiefs shall find no resting place on this side of the great lakes.”

ENTER “MAD ANTHONY”

Back in New York, Secretary of Treasury, Alexander Hamilton needed a plan. The country continued to bleed money and he needed more land in Ohio to be surveyed and gridded into a ledger so he could balance the governments finances. On July 20, 1790 he established the General Land Office which included the position of Surveyor General.  Hamilton determined 100 acres and upward were to be sold to land companies for 30 cents per acre. The land could be paid for in gold, silver, or public securities – many of which were war credits earned during the revolutionary war. Land could also be sold with a two year credit plus six percent interest. Townships were 10 miles square and the surveys had to be paid for by the land companies or their land-seeking colonial settlers.

This was attractive to would-be land owners, many of whom migrated from Europe where they had no hope of ever owning a piece of property. This was a dream come true, if not for the nightmare of violence occurring throughout Ohio. George Washington was recruiting, and Indigenous warriors were killing, mercenaries from Kentucky and Tennessee at a rate of four for every one trained U.S. soldier. But he knew this was the price you pay to become a global power like England, France, or Spain. He knew he needed their land to raise the money necessary to build a stronger army, but no matter the size of troops he was sending in to battle, they were losing terribly. The Indigenous people of Ohio were not going to give in. They never have and they never will.

Washington needed a new approach. He pulled Major General “Mad Anthony” Wayne out of retirement in Georgia to lead the “Legion of the United States”. This was the first army organized under the direction of the Congress and Executive branches after the adoption of the Constitution. It demonstrates both a shift in attitude from the state and from George Washington who needed victories over his enemies and their land. “Mad Anthony” was known, even by Washington, to be unreliable making him an odd choice for leading a newly formalized federal army. But he earned that nickname for a reason. He developed a reputation in the Revolutionary War for being temperamental and ruthless. And he was an alcoholic. Washington probably knew he needed a military leader like this to exert monstrous acts of violence on innocent children and women and men of all ages.

Wayne and his troops made their way to the northwest corner of Ohio to Fort Defiance in the middle of allied Indigenous nations. He sent word to the Shawnee,

“In pity to your innocent women and children, come and prevent the further effusion of your blood.”

The Shawnee refused to back down. So on a rainy August 20th, 1794, Wayne ordered his men to destroy their crops, fields, and homes. They proceeded to murder innocent women, children, and old men. After just one hour of “Mad Anthony”, the Shawnee were overwhelmed and were forced to accept defeat. The U.S. soldiers continued destroying crops and homes for three days and fifty miles in their retreat to Fort Defiance. Known as the Battle of Fallen Timbers, this led to the signing of the Treaty of Greenville and it set the tone for the United States’ ‘shock and awe’ approach to military force over sovereign nations – and the displacement and murder of innocent Indigenous people here and abroad. It was enough to earn Wayne his own fort in what is now known at Fort Wayne, Indiana.

FEASTING ON A BUNCH-OF-GRAPES

The Greenville Treaty opened up ¾ of the what was to become the state of Ohio to white colonial settlers. Hamilton’s newly formed General Land Office and the Surveyor General could now continue the carving up of land into neatly ordered squares. Two years later, the Land Act of 1796 was passed. It was time to divvy up the land for “military purposes” and “for propagating the Gospel among the Heathen.”

Jefferson’s Land Ordinance called for land to be set aside for veterans of the Revolutionary War. This chunk of curvilinear land in Ohio was called the U.S. Military Reserve. The Land Act also designated land for the “Society of the United Brethren”, also known as the Moravian Church. These are the protestant missionaries I mentioned last week. A band of Moravians had taken in members of a Lenape tribe and moved west to Ohio to escape the warring tensions in the original 13 colonies only to be innocently murdered by a group of U.S. minutemen from Philadelphia dispatched by George Washington.

More Moravians had settled in Ohio along the Muskingum River in the middle of the Military Reserve designated in the Land Act. They had converted more Indigenous people to Christianity after the brutal defeat in the Battle of Fallen Timbers. The U.S. Government wanted to encourage more conversions, so they granted them land.

The Land Act also put into writing very precise methods of surveying, slicing, plotting, and platting by an empowered Survey General. The U.S. Government could no longer rely on land companies and eager, greedy speculators to conduct shoddy surveys. Section 1 of the Act reads as follows (comments and translations provided by C. Albert White):

“Sec. 1. A Surveyor General shall be appointed. He shall engage skillful surveyors as his deputies. He shall survey the lands northwest of the Ohio River and above the mouth of the Kentucky River (in Kentucky) in which Indian title has been extinguished (Greenville Treaty). He shall frame regulations and instructions for his deputies and they shall take an oath (to do proper work) and he may remove (fire) them for negligence or misconduct.”

America’s first Survey General was none only than Rufus Putnam, one of the co-founders of the Ohio Company of Associates. He was the one I mentioned last week who gathered with his friends at the Bunch-of-Grapes tavern in Boston ten years earlier in 1786 – just one year after Jefferson negotiated the Land Ordinance of 1785. They drafted a plan for how to profit from the settlement in the Ohio territories, sent it to their friends in Congress to enact, and here Putnam was in charge of surveying and platting land ceded by force so that he, his buddies, and the United States could profit. Clear evidence of just how intertwined crony capitalism, cartesian cartography, Christianity, and White supremacy are rooted in the American government and military.

Jefferson’s dream was finally coming true. The U.S. government was just hitting its stride. They now had an organized and methodical means of measuring and dissecting land for sale to citizens seeking land settlement and companies seeking financial settlement. All so the United States could amass a larger military as they headed west into the sunset, charting meridians on a map as they marched toward global domination.

Hello Interactors,

This week we continue to explore how maps played a major role in the shaping of America. Thomas Jefferson had a vision of a neatly portioned empire, just as the globe was neatly partitioned into a grid of latitude and longitude lines. Sure he wanted land for farmers, but he also needed to extract property tax revenue to fill the newly formed government’s coffers that had been emptied by the Revolutionary war.

The task of surveying and mapping fell on the shoulders of America’s first and only chief Geographer, Thomas Hutchins. Like most things in colonial America, it wasn’t easy.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or feel free to email me directly.

Now let’s go…

A BUNCH OF GRAPES

While Thomas Jefferson had grown accustom to the precision of his celestial and nautical instruments, surveying in the rugged American terrain was far from precise. The United States’ first official Geographer, Thomas Hutchins, was venturing into thick woods, mud bogs, and colonies of angry, disenfranchised inhabitants. And his motley crew of eight, out of the planned 13, may not have helped. It was an inauspicious start to Jefferson’s cartographic carving up of a countryside into covenants made of cunningly crafted cartesian corners. Meanwhile, George Washington’s war buddies wanted in on the land Hutchins was about to map out.

Hutchins and his men gathered in Pittsburgh in September of 1785 to head west for the Ohio River. As the first government organized and funded survey of public land, they were to map a grid of townships along the Ohio River known as the Seven Ranges. Of the eight men who showed up most were sent by wealthy prospectors, including founders of what was to become a few months later, the Ohio Company. This organization was loosely formed in Boston at the Bunch-of-Grapes tavern by a group of high ranking Revolutionary war veterans. This was more than a tavern. Bunch-of-Grapes was where power-broker backroom deals were made, slaves were traded, and land grabs were orchestrated. These men devised a scheme that would award them land in Ohio. They wrote it up and sent it off to the Confederation Congress who then granted them five percent of the southeastern corner of what was to become the state of Ohio.

Many of the men assigned to Hutchins were scouts for these land speculators. They weren’t interested in Jefferson’s plan to modernize and subdivide the country for the purpose of taxation, farming, and community building. Only one of the eight was truly qualified to survey alongside the experienced and capable Hutchins. The following list are the eight of 13 delegates originally intended to represent all of the colonies:

* Edward Dowse: New Hampshire. He actually wasn’t from New Hampshire, but Massachusetts. After the Revolutionary war he was involved in the East India Company and Chinese trade. He later served as a U.S. Representative.

* Benjamin Tupper: Massachusetts. This state first appointed Rufus Putnam. Putnam is one of the founders of the Ohio Company. He declined because he had recently accepted the position of Surveyor General for lands in what was to become the state of Maine. Putnam requested that Tupper go in his place. It’s believed Tupper was mostly a scout for the Ohio Company.

* Isaac Sherman: Connecticut. This post was initially offered to Samuel Parsons, another co-founder of the Ohio Company. So Parsons suggested Sherman. Isaac was the son of a founding father you’ve never heard of, Roger Sherman. He was an attorney about the same age as Benjamin Franklin and the only one to have signed Continental Association, the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution. Roger had just become the first mayor of New Haven, Connecticut, supported Jefferson’s idea of government acquired land as a revenue source, and was keen to settle the Connecticut Western Reserve – a block of land in what is now eastern Ohio.

* Absalom Martin: New Jersey. Martin indeed was a surveyor and you can find his work archived at the Bureau of Land Management website. He most likely was there working on behalf of John Cleves Symmes. Symmes was a Revolutionary War Colonel and congressional delegate who had sent scouts to the Ohio territory in search of profitable land. He organized a group called the Miami Company. The U.S. Government handed over 200 thousand acres plus a 23 thousand acre township Martin was likely surveying. The Symmes Purchase included a village called Losantiville – later named Cincinnati. This area is also home to a curiously named university that many mistake for being in Florida – Miami University, also known as Miami of Ohio. It was one of the original eight Ivy League schools and is named, like the company, after the Miami Rivers in Ohio.

* William Morris: New York. Morris was perhaps the one a true surveyor and mathematician at the level of Hutchins.

* Alexander Parker: Virginia. Parker was a surveyor and woodsman who was comfortable navigating the frontier.

* James Simpson: Maryland. Simpson was actually from New York and his affiliation or qualifications are not clear.

* Robert Johnston: Georgia. Hutchins called him “Dr. Johnston”. He was a wealthy man from Maryland, but represented Georgia.

MATHEMATICIANS GONE WILD

A month prior to this crew assembling, in August 1785, the head of the Survey commission, Andrew Ellicott, hammered a wooded stake on the northwest bank of the Ohio River. It’s roughly where the Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Virginia borders come together at 40° 38’ 27” latitude and 80° 31’ 0” longitude west. This stick in the mud, a point on the globe, was the start of a line from which Hutchins would probe. All for a square, that a surveyor would sign, so a White man could claim, “This land is mine.”  

It makes it sound easy, but it was anything but. Hutchins and his crew showed up with little more than compasses, a sextant, and a circumferentor. Also known as a surveyor’s compass, a circumferentor includes sights on the north and south sides of the compass. Looking through the sights, the surveyor lines up a point on the horizon in one direction and then another. They then measure the interior angle between the two. This was commonly put on a tripod with a lead-weighted plumb-line pointing at a reference point of origin marked on the ground in the center of the tripod. This would have been the modern-day version of the ancient Roman groma mentioned in an earlier post. And like the Romans, they also needed a way to measure distance between points. For that they used a Gunter’s chain with poles attached at each end.

While the Gunter’s chain was invented in England in 1620 by mathematician Edmund Gunter, who also invented what became the slide-rule – a Gunter’s scale, English surveying commonly used different instruments than these. Because much surveying was done unobstructed in fields, heavier and more precise instruments could be wheeled in place for surveying. Often with the assistance of the military. Surveyors in colonial America, however, often found themselves in mosquito infested, dense dark forests that merged with smelly swamps spilling into swift cold waters running through steep, rough, and rugged terrain. It called for improvisation.

In Silvio Bedini's book, Thinkers and Tinkers – Early American Men of Science, talks of the ingenuity forged by necessity among the self-taught thinkers and tinkerers of the European colonizers. He mentions in his book the contrast between the surveying context of these two competing and conquering countries:

"Land had to be cleared for settlements and roadways and rivers opened up for navigation, and surveying required techniques and instruments quite different from those traditionally used in England where the majority of areas were open."

John Love, a British surveyor who surveyed and mapped the Carolina’s in the 1600s, was instrumental in getting would-be colonial surveyors up to speed. In 1687, one hundred years before Hutchins’ and his crew set out for Ohio, Love published a book called, Geodaesia: or, The Art of Surveying and Measuring Land Made Easier. This was a popular field guide for surveyors throughout the colonial times. In the preface he hints at the challenges a naïve surveyor in America may run into:

"I have seen Young men, in America, often nonplus'd so, that their Books would not help them forward, particularly in Carolina, about Laying out Lands, when a certain quantity of Acres has been given to be laid out five or six times as broad as long."

Even in the seventeenth century, Love would have measured plats of land with a Gunter’s chain. Stretching 66 feet long, it’s made up of 100 wire links 7.92 inches long. Edmund Gunter’s clever math allows for easy multiplication and division by 10. One Gunter’s chain is equal to 22 yards which equates to 1/10th of an acre. Ten chains square is equal to one acre, and a single link is 1/100th of a Gunter’s chain.  John Love’s book even provided a handy conversion table – but it also included a few lessons on rhomboids, chords, and trapezoids. It turned out trigonometry was sometimes needed to exact the measurements precise surveys required.

HUTCHINS LAST STAND

Surveying under these conditions was not a simple task and Hutchins had but one or two men capable of doing the math necessary to measure, calculate, and draw accurately.  But precision is what the surveyor’s son, Thomas Jefferson, had in mind when he drafted the Land Ordinance’s of 1784 and 1785 – including the establishment and designation of the Geographer’s Line. This was an imaginary line from the point of origin, marked by that piece of wood lodged above the waterline in the bank of the Ohio River to another point forty-two miles due west along the meridian that encircles the globe.

Hutchins did his best to place himself and his crew at the exact place on earth where his measurements were to begin. He likely used his sextant to measure his location relative to the sun thus determining his latitude. But he documented the starting point as 40° 38’ 02” which is 22” off of the meridian – an error of nearly 1.5 half miles. The crew, in a hurry to make progress, then headed due west documenting one mile after another to establish the Geographer’s Line. Mapping historian and surveyor, C. Albert White, describes it in his book, A History of the Rectangular Survey System:

“Between September 30 and October 8, 1785, Hutchins, the other 8 surveyors, and a crew of about 30 chainmen and axemen ran 4 miles of line west from the beginning point. The line was run with a compass or circumferentor, with orientation at each point by using the compass needle, and measured with a two-pole Gunter's chain held horizontally. A post was set at the end of each mile. Bearing trees were taken and scribed using either a carpenter's race knife or cooper's (barrel maker's) knife. At the rate of $2 per mile, the crew only earned $8 for nine day's work. On October 8, 1785, Hutchins stopped work because he had word of Indian trouble at Tuscarawas, 50 miles to the west. Though Hutchins made an elaborate report of these four miles of line to the Congress, it was nevertheless a very poor showing for the year.”

Fifty miles may seem a fair distance away to be of concern, but this Ohio region had become the new frontline of resistance to settler expansion westward. There was also lingering British competition for land. Just three years prior, in 1782, George Washington dispatched Philadelphia minutemen to the Ohio frontier to exact revenge on raids from angered Indigenous tribes in Pennsylvania. Not far from the soon to be west end of the Geographer’s Line, the militia happened across a group of nearly one-hundred Lenape people tending to their corn. The troops surrounded them and took aim with their muskets. The Lenape froze and pleaded their innocence with the men. The soldiers held a vote as to whether they should killed these peaceful, defenseless people or not. Seconds later 96 Lenape people lay dead. Massacred.

These Lenape were known as Christian Lenape and had just returned to their homeland after having been driven north by competing British-allied tribes a year earlier. The Christian Lenape dated back to the early 1700s. A group of Christian Moravian missionaries, originating from the present day Czech Republic, found a small group of Lenape people following them after their tribe had nearly been exterminated by small pox. The missionaries took them in and converted them to Christianity. Colonial Moravians settled far from others to protect their followers from the tension that emerged from competing religions, native conflict, and colonial settlement. By the late 1700’s they had moved to the Ohio frontier to escape the very violence that ended up taking their lives.

Despite Hutchins’ disappointing start to the mapping of the Seven Ranges, he returned on August 9th,  1786 with six of the original delegates and six more were added. Hutchins picked up where he left off and began running due west to create the Geographer’s Line. After measuring six miles from that stick in the mud on the northwest bank of the Ohio River, he sent Absalom Martin due south toward to a bend in the Ohio River. This was to be range number one of seven. At the next six mile juncture, he sent Adam Hoops of Philadelphia south, then came Isaac Sherman, then Ebenezer Sproat of Rhode Island, then Winthrop Sargent who had replace Edward Dowse, then James Simpson, and finally the two most capable surveyors and mathematicians took ranges six and seven: William Morris and Thomas Hutchins.

Hutchins, again, was forced to retreat due to Indigenous resistance. By the middle of October, Winthrop Sargent had finished most of the fifth range, but was also forced to retreat. Hutchins was now short on time. He directed six of the men to complete east-west lines in order to complete at least some townships. By the middle of November 1786, four ranges of townships had been completed. They spent the next two months drawing and detailing their maps. Hutchins then left a frigid Ohio back east to New York for his presentation to the Board of Treasury of their progress.

In April of 1787 Ludlow and Martin returned to Ohio and then Simpson soon after. Ludlow hastily finished the seventh range in two weeks. Harassed but not deterred by native resistance, Simpson and Martin were able to complete ranges five and six soon after Ludlow. While their work was wrapped up by June 1787, the Board of Treasury in New York did not receive final maps and plats until July of 1788. By then Congress had grown impatient and between September and October of 1787 had already sold land on those first four ranges Hutchins and his crew completed in the final months of 1786. Hutchins returned again to Ohio in the fall of 1788, then traveled home to detail his work, and on April 28th, 1789 he died.

Hello Interactors,

This week we pick up where we left off with Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson had appointed Thomas Hutchins to be Geographer of the United States in 1781. In 1784 Jefferson was preparing for expansion west and was combing over Hutchins’ descriptions of what lie west of his beloved Virginia. Jefferson was dubious of Hutchins’ mapping facts and took it up with him in a personal correspondence. What follows is the unfolding of a cartography project of Roman scale. And the birth of an empire.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or feel free to email me directly.

Now let’s go…

ON TURTLE ISLAND

Thomas Jefferson was born with a passion for measuring the world. His father, Peter Jefferson, was a surveyor, naturalist, cartographer, and colonial settler. He instilled in his son a love and interest in the culture and languages the Indigenous people. Later in life, Thomas Jefferson even partnered with another Indigenous admirer and fellow colonizer I mentioned back in February, Roger Williams. They collaborated on documenting the nuances of local native languages. Jefferson compiled twenty years of notes on Indigenous dialects and culture that travelled with him to New York City when he became president. Upon returning to Monticello the boatmen responsible for transporting his belongings ripped opened a box containing the precious papers in search of valuables to be stolen. When all they saw were piles of paper, they tossed them overboard. Decades of research and knowledge lost. As a young man, Jefferson spent time with Indigenous people – and so did his father. In a letter to John Adams, Jefferson writes,

“Concerning Indians . . . in the early part of my life, I was very familiar, and acquired impressions of attachment and commiseration for them which have never been obliterated. Before the Revolution, they were in the habit of coming often and in great numbers to the seat of government where I was very much with them. I knew much the great Ontassete, the warrior and orator of the Cherokees; he was always the guest of my father, on his journey's to and from Williamsburg.”

Even as Jefferson was scheming to carve up the land his forefathers had invaded into a cartesian grid, he held natives in high regard, writing in 1785,

“I am safe in affirming that the proofs of genius given by the Indians place them on a level with the whites. . . . I have seen some thousands myself, and conversed much with them. . . . I believe the Indian to be in body and mind equal to the white man.”

Thomas envisioned an interracial “Continental America”. Later, in 1802, he said to a group of native Americans, "Your blood will mix with ours, and will spread, with ours, over this great island." The word ‘island’ is most likely in reference to ‘Turtle Island’ which is rooted in the Native North American creation story, including the Haudenosaunee – a confederacy of six nations in the Northeast. This ancient tale tells how the ‘Great Sprit’ (a term Jefferson commonly used in place of the word ‘God’) created the land of America and its people – complex people capable of both good and evil. As Jefferson was toiling over Hutchins’ maps and words in 1784, looking west at the silhouetted Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, he was about to embark on an endeavor that history can now regard as both good and evil.

JEFFERSON MISCALCULATES

Jefferson loved contemplating the universe and fell in love with astronomy in college in 1760. The study of the stars gave him an appreciation for the universe Isaac Newton had revealed a century before. On his transatlantic trips to and from England and France, he’d be on deck exacting the stars dotting the dark sky and calculating meridians as the boat curved along the earth’s surface. He collected maps, globes, and sextants and obsessed over the global coordinate system. He wasn’t alone. This was a time when a consistent calculation of longitude remained elusive and there was a £20,000 prize for a solution. Newton believed the solution would come from astronomy, but woodworker and clockmaker, John Harrison, invented a  mechanical marine chronometer and won the prize in 1773.

So it should come as no surprise that Jefferson was able to scrutinize the maps his newly appointed chief geographer, Thomas Hutchins, had published of the territories west of Virginia. Hutchins had been in this role just three years when Jefferson wrote to him with this inquiry in 1784:

Sir

I have been recurring to your pamphlet (which I borrowed for that purpose) for the times at which the inundations begin and end in the Missouri, Missisipi, Illinois, Ohio, Wabache, but I do not find it mentioned there. Will you be so kind as to give me as accurate an account of these times as you can? Does the Tanissee overflow periodically? I suppose not. Will you give me leave to correct an error in your pamphlet page 13. where you say that the country extending from Fort Pitt to the Missisipi and on both sides watered by the Ohio and it’s branches contains at least a million of square miles. I think the Ohio in all it’s parts and branches cannot water more than the fourth of that. Count the degrees in your map into which it pushes it’s branches. You will find them not quite 80, but suppose them made 80 by the branch of the Tanissee which heads in S. Carola. A degree in the middle of this space would contain about 3000, or 3100 square miles and of course 80 would contain about 250,000. I think the whole United states reduced to a square would not be more than one of 900 miles each way and of course that the whole U.S. do not contain a million of square miles. Excuse my freedom. I think this an error in your pamphlet and would wish to know from you whether I see it wrong. I am with much esteem Sir

Your most obedt. servt

Th: Jefferson

The pamphlet Jefferson is referring to is Hutchins 1778 publication, Topographical Description of Virginia, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and North Carolina. Hardly a pamphlet as we think of them today, it’s over 100 pages of mostly textual descriptions of the land he had explored as far west as the Mississippi River. The majority of which highlighted the agriculture, climate, and land features suitable for settling. As a plantation owner who believed farming was the future of America, it makes sense Jefferson took such interest in the ratio of water to land in Hutchins’ work. It was all part of his grand vision of a mass agrarian expansion west. This is why he wanted Hutchins to lead efforts to survey, measure, and carve it up into a precise and quantifiable grid. Just as the latitude and longitude lines carve up the globe as he bobbed his way across the Atlantic.

But Jefferson’s estimation of Turtle Island’s expanse was way off. The whole United States reduced to a square, as Jefferson posited, would end up being nearly four times larger than he imagined. Jefferson didn’t believe that imaginary rectangle could be larger than a million square miles, but it turns out to be nearly four million miles square. Since he’d never really travelled west of the Blue Ridge Mountains, it’s easy to see where it would be hard to imagine. It’s hard to imagine four million square miles even when seen from a satellite image. What Jefferson was trying to rectify, was just how much land to quantify, upon which taxes his country could rely.

HUMAN RIGHTS. STATE FIGHTS.

Jefferson was acting out what had already been done in Europe in the late 1600s and early 1700s. Rulers pushed for more centralized power and control and cartography played a staring role. The Enlightenment led to what some describe as ‘Enlightened Absolutism’.

Two elements emerge under this interpretation of the Enlightenment:

* An explosion of discovery and invention that led to cultural and societal advancement.

* A recognition of needed state resources, power, and control for the purpose of war.

It fell on cartography to map the acquisition of land through the drawing of lines for the exercise of power. Modernization during the enlightenment included demonstrating governance through systematic documenting and registering of land. Jefferson, a worshipper of the Enlightenment, was acting out the ‘enlightened’ European practice of nation building, cadastral mapping, and growing an army.

The revolutionary war had left the new formed United States of America strapped for cash. Like their European contemporaries, they went about collecting funds through subdividing the land to excise tax. When Jefferson wrote to Hutchins in January of 1784 with his questions, he likely was in the process of preparing the Land Ordinance of 1784. This document called for the creation of states west of the Appalachian mountains, north of the Ohio River, and east of the Mississippi River. The ordinance included these five articles:

* The new states shall remain forever a part of the United States of America.

* They shall bear the same relation to the confederation as the original states.

* They shall pay their apportionment of the federal debts.

* They shall in their governments uphold republican forms.

* After the year 1800 there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in any of them.

This ordinance was put to committee in April of 1784, but with one glaring omission – Article 5. Abolishing slavery lost by a single vote. Virginia representative James Monroe was absent from voting, at home sick in bed. Monroe, like other slave owning Virginians including Jefferson and James Madison, were routinely conflicted over slavery. They struggled with two competing ideals, upholding the enlightened values of human rights they ensconced in the constitution, and holding together this loose collection of newly formed states for fear of civil war over the issue of slavery. Another example of tension riddled compromise came 16 years later when the absent voter, Monroe, was then President of the United States. He signed the Missouri Compromise in 1820 which admitted Missouri as a slave state while abolishing slavery in states to the north. To this day, our elected leaders continue to waffle on the rights of all humans as imagined by Jefferson. After the loss of Article 5, Jefferson wrote,

"The voice of a single individual would have prevented this abominable crime; heaven will not always be silent; the friends to the rights of human nature will in the end prevail."

There were also conflicts over just how these states should be carved up. Jefferson had a clear vision of uniform divisions for the purpose of expansion, taxation, and farming. But corporations and private land speculators had other ideas. They had already been grabbing up land and selling it to settlers for a profit. They also had an ally in the government – Alexander Hamilton. This pitted Jefferson against Hamilton in how to measure and divide the newly acquired land.

Former surveyor and cadastral mapping historian, C. Albert White, writes, the Jefferson group included advocates:

“of [the] sale [of land] to individual settlers in small parcels. The small farmers, frontiers men, and merchants argued that an essential part of a democracy was the right to own property. They could not afford to buy land in large tracts, and if it were sold in huge blocks to wealthy men, the small man would be squeezed out or forced to pay high prices and interest.”

Meanwhile, the Hamilton group was:

“generally made up of wealthy southern aristocrats and plantation owners, did not think the democracy advocates were capable of settling the land intelligently or capable of handling land ownership. The conservatives were in favor of large grants at low prices to companies or wealthy men who would then handle the business of settlement, such as surveying and patenting.”

This was around the time Hamilton was establishing the Bank of New York and he thought Jefferson’s rational approach to subdividing the land would take too long. He favored the rough and tumble approach called ‘metes and bounds’ which is a method that had established the irregular boundaries of the existing colonies and states. It was also a system that had already clogged the courts in land disputes. But Hamilton argued,

“It had not been the general governmental policy in the colonies to sell land as a source of revenue prior to the war. The people were familiar with the free settlement system and would occupy and hold the territory faster if allowed free location.”

AN ORDINANCE ORDAINED

Jefferson, ever the cartographer’s son, knew what he was doing and pushed ahead with his plan. The expansion west would be divided into a grid. And in echoes of the Roman land plots called ‘centuries’ mentioned in last week’s post, Jefferson would follow by naming them ‘hundreds’. As C. Albert White documents:

“In 1784, a committee headed by Jefferson drafted an ordinance which called for prior survey of tracts ten geographical miles square, which were called hundreds; they would be subdivided into lots one mile square. The lines would run due north and south, east and west and settlement would be by hundreds or by lots.”

After months of debate, the tract size was reduced from ten to seven mile-squares with 49 township lots. One square would be allocated for a school, another for a church, and four would be reserved for Congress to assign at a later date. One-third of any precious minerals found would also be granted to the government. The township squares were to be sold at auction for $1 per acre.

This plan drew further objections and the size was reduced once again to six miles square. The intent was to minimize land barons from buying large tracts on speculation. There was also fear that townships spread too far apart would leave them overly vulnerable to attacks by angry Indigenous nations. On May 20, the Land Ordinance of 1785 was passed.

"Be it ordained by the United States in Congress assembled, that the territory ceded by individual states to the United States, which had been purchased of the Indian inhabitants, shall be disposed of in the following manner:

A surveyor from each state shall be appointed by Congress or a committee of the states, who shall take an oath for the faithful discharge of his duty, before the geographer of the United States, who is hereby empowered and directed to administer the same; and the like oath shall be administered to each chain carrier, by the surveyor under whom he acts.”

The chief surveyor and geographer of the United States under whom they would act was Thomas Hutchins. He was granted a team consisting of one surveyor from each of the 13 States. But only eight showed up to work. Their first task was to map a section of land west of the Ohio River bordering West Virginia known as the Seven Ranges. This was the beginning of the United States Public Land Surveying System, known today as the Bureau of Land Management.

Hutchins and his crew began work September of 1785 on the north bank of the Ohio River. But it only lasted a week. On October 8th word came of Indigenous unrest due west of their site near land occupied by the Tuscarawas. Hutchins and his crew had only surveyed four miles. A disappointing start to a monumental task. And their troubles had only just begun.

Hello Interactors,

This is week two of Cartography. The next few posts will serve as a series looking at how the map of the United States came to be and its role in charting our history.

This post looks behind the origins of those neatly organized polygons that enable the choropleth maps I talked about last week. Mapmaking’s history dates back to ancient times – as do the motivations behind them. While maps help us to better understand and interact with the world, they also help establish authority and control.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or feel free to email me directly.

Now let’s go…

Maps are as elemental to communication as numbers and words. Perhaps even more so. Anthropologists acknowledge that unlike numbers and words, maps don’t require any formal training to understand. It’s been a form of communication for almost as long as we’ve been around. The oldest known map, a map of stars in the sky found in the Lascaux caves in France, dates back to half way through the stone age. It’s hard to imagine just how long ago that was. But imagine your arm as a timeline. If homo sapiens originated at the shoulder and we’re now at the tip of the middle finger, cavernous cartography was happening just above the elbow. Who knows why, but somebody had something to say and they said it with a map. Using their arm to do it.

The Cambridge dictionary says a map is:

“a drawing of the earth's surface, or part of that surface, showing the shape and position of different countries, political borders, natural features such as rivers and mountains, and artificial features such as roads and buildings.”

As early as the Egyptians, people have been drawing maps of the natural landscape both by hand and with the aid of technology. The Ancient Egyptian Turin Gold Mine Map is the oldest surviving land map. It dates back to 1150 BC and features prominent horizontal dried river beds surrounded by mountains with patches of vegetation scattered about. These rocky roads are typical of the riverbeds of this desert that extend to the Red Sea. The map’s legend, written in the ancient Egyptian equivalent of cursive reads, "the mountains where gold is worked: they are colored in red."

By this time, the Egyptians were also skilled at surveying. We need only look at the precision of pyramids to see they had a firm grasp of geometry. In fact, the Egyptians were employing elements of the Pythagorean theorem 1500 years before it’s namesake, Pythagoras. The word Geometry is derived from Greek and literally means the measure of the earth. (geo-metron, or earth-measure). There are few surviving maps illustrating the precision required for the surveys their construction. But etched in this 14 centimeter high narrow sliver of stone are the plans for a tomb found in the Valley of the Kings. It’s believed to be the tomb of Ramesses IX who died in 1111 BC.

The Greek historian, Herodotus, was the first known historian to write history based on found antiquities and here’s what he observed about the Egyptian’s use of surveying and geometry for a purpose other than tombs and pyramids. Taxation.

“…the king, the priests went on to say, who was responsible for the division and distribution of land into individual square holdings, of equal size, among the Egyptians and for making the plots his source of revenue by fixing the amount of tax to be paid yearly on each holding…I attribute the invention of geometry to this cause and from Egypt it spread to Greece.”

The Greek and Romans went on to perfect the practice of surveying and mapping. In 150 AD Claudius Ptolemy published his massive book called Geography. It was a collection of maps but also a scientific and cartographic treatise. It included a map of the world with a curved grid of latitude and longitude that went on to influence and inspired cartographers well into the Renaissance.

AUGUSTUS CHARTIS

Ptolemy’s work and reputation is so monumental that it’s overshadowed the proliferation, progress, and sometimes punishing practice of practical cartography by the Romans. The surveying and plotting of infrastructure and land was the fuel that fed the fire of Roman expansion and colonization. When we think of the gridded streets and blocks of our modern cities, it’s easy to imagine a map of, say, New York.

But large-scale rectilinear allocation of land started in ancient Rome.  In the decades leading up to the first century A.D., Augustus requested surveys of fixed dimensions to designate blocks, or ‘centuries’ as they were called. Major and minor roads ran between them and each block and street was labeled. Like the maps so common today.

Cartography historian, O. A. W. Dilke writes,

“One of the main advantages of a detailed map of Rome was to improve the efficiency of the city's administration. Augustus had divided Rome into fourteen districts, each subdivided into vici. These districts were administered by annually elected magistrates, with officials and public slaves under them.”

The tool used to determine these rectangular subdivisions was a surveying instrument called a groma. Imagine two foot long boards the width of a finger overlapping at 90 degrees to form a symmetrical cross.  Now imagine a long pole the length of shovel handle with tripod arms to keep it upright. The cross connected to the top of the pole with a bracket that it allowed it to pivot around the pole. Dangling from the tips of the cross were long strings with lead weights attached to their ends.

The surveyor would use a portable sundial to first determine a north-south orientation and then drive a stack in the ground as a point of origin for the first plot. The groma would then be place near the stake with one of the lead weights positioned above the stake. An assistant would walk 120 feet in the general direction of one of the cross members holding a long stick. (120 feet was the customary distance an ox pulling a plow would walk before being turned.) The surveyor would then approach the groma facing the assistant, most likely with one eye closed, and direct his assistant to the left or the right with his long stick held vertically. When the stick lined up with the dangling strings the surveyor would ask his assistant to place the stick in the ground. This established a straight line between two points along which more stakes would be placed.

A line would then be drawn on a portable wax tablet, papyrus, and eventually the same paper I used to draw maps in college – vellum. This process would be repeated until all the plots were designated and drawn. More permanent cartographic records of the surveys were then etched into bronze and stored for safe keeping. Land surveyor Hyginus Gromaticus published a book of surveying somewhere between the year 98-117 AD where he documents the practice.

“We shall write both on the maps and on the bronze tablets…all mapping indications, "given and assigned," "granted," "excepted," "restored, exchanged for own property," "restored to previous owner," and any other abbreviations in common use, to remain on the map. We shall take to the emperor's record office the mapping registers and the plan of the whole surveyed area drawn in lines according to its particular boundary system, adding the names of the immediate neighbors. If any property, either in the immediate neighborhood or elsewhere, has been given to the colony, we shall enter it in the register of assets. Anything else of surveying interest will have to be held not only by the colony but by the emperor's record office, signed by the founder. This is how we shall allocate undeveloped land in the provinces.”

THE VANISHING LINE

The Romans perfected large scale cartography through colonization. A practice now called cadastral mapping. The word cadastral is derived from the Greek word, katástikhon: to organize by line. Cadastral maps use measurements and coordinates to designate plots that delineate ownership and delegate magistrate. It’s a practice they spread throughout Europe and around the world and is still used today. Somewhere there is a cadastral map describing the land you’re sitting on as you read or listen to this post. But there is no direct lineage from ancient Roman cadastral maps and ours. As the Roman Empire fell in 476 AD so did precision mapping. Including cadastral maps. Map historian P. D. A. Harvey writes:

“…the observance of a fixed proportion between distances on the map and distances on the ground, played practically no part in medieval maps of small areas; they were scarcely ever based on measured surveys.“

And of the measured maps remaining from this era, like the detailed gridded maps of Palestine for example, nearly all of them are drawn from an imaginary point of view, often floating from above. Most are more pictorial than graphic and rely on text to describe topographical features. Written records seem to have displaced map making during these centuries. There are only three known English maps until 1350. But something changed in 1500. Again, map historian P. D. A. Harvey writes:

“…from the mid-twelfth to the mid-fourteenth century we have only three [maps] in all, from each half-century between 1350 and 1500 about ten, and from the half-century 1500-1550 about two hundred.”

With the Renaissance came new materials, pigments, paintings, methods of mathematics, and more maps. Maps were being made of the sky, the sea, and the land. Often in coordination with global European expansion. Including the colonization of America.

Nautical and celestial charts were crucial to voyages to America by Europeans in search of gold, slaves, and land. Upon disembarking from their ships, Europeans turned again to surveying, subdividing, and subduing the land. And its occupants. Cadastral maps re-emerged in the 16th and 17th century, but mostly at local scales. And then came the American Revolution. Thomas Jefferson had big plans for American expansion and worldwide dominance. They needed land and it needed to be organized by line. They needed cadastral map generation at a Roman scale. And so that’s what they set out to do.

WHEN IN AMERICA, DO AS THE ROMANS DID

One of the earliest cartographers in the British Colonies was a Scottish engineer and immigrant, Robert Erskine. He ran an ironworks plant in New Jersey starting in 1771 – the same year the British awarded him fellowship into the prestigious Royal Society for his contributions in engineering. But he was sympathetic to the American cause and as war broke out with the British, he organized his workforce into a militia. He also engineered an underwater blockade that was placed in the Hudson River to stop British boats from advancing. George Washington took note of his engineering and cartography prowess and made him Colonel. He also made him the army’s Geographer and Surveyor General.

In 1778 Erskine hired an assistant, Rutgers University’s first and only graduate, Simeon DeWitt. Together, these two drew a sizable collection of maps of the northern British Colonies. Many of which are accessible today through the New York Historical Society’s digital collection. A good number of which include maps to taverns sprinkled around the early settlements. DeWitt went on to survey and layout the gridded pattern of New York City in 1807. Property owners and proprietors had differing opinions of how roadways were to be laid out in the city so the state stepped in and appointed DeWitt to issue a plan. His plan was rectilinear and Romanesque. Orderly and taxable.

Back in 1781, George Washington showered praise on DeWitt just as he did Erskine. He encouraged Virginia Governor, colonial expansionist Thomas Jefferson to award him the title of Geographer of the United States. Jefferson offered, but DeWitt turned him down. He preferred to settle in his beloved Albany, New York. But there was another surveyor, engineer, and cartographer, Thomas Hutchins, who had been making a name for himself charting territories to the west and south of the British Colonies. In 1781 Hutchins was awarded the title Geographer of the United States. Nobody has held that title since.

Hutchins was born in New Jersey in 1730 and at age 16 joined the British Army. He soon found himself fighting in the French and Indian War. Showing skill in surveying and engineering, the army hired him as an engineer in 1766. Shortly thereafter he was floating down the Ohio river surveying newly acquired land by the British as part of the 1763 Treaty of Paris. Eight years later, in 1774, he found himself floating down the Mississippi River collecting data that was soon to be published in his upcoming book, “Historical, Narrative and Topographical Description of Louisiana and West Florida.“  

But Hutchins witnessed ugly war atrocities during his time with the British Army, including the execution of Scottish soldiers at the hands of their fellow British troops. Many in the English infantry didn’t much appreciate fighting alongside Scottish Highlanders. Witnessing the savagery and in-fighting, the American Revolution was becoming increasingly attractive to Hutchins.

In the final years of his British sponsored excursion down the Mississippi, he began sending coded messages to the Americans – including Benjamin Franklin. The British suspected as much and had him investigated. Hutchins’ knowledge of Indigenous American land was too valuable to be handed to the Americans. In 1780 Hutchins left the British Army and was promptly convicted of treason. He escaped to France and connected with Franklin and asked to join the American army. He was perhaps the only British officer to switch sides during the war.

A year later, in 1781, he was awarded his United States Geographer title. His biggest job was about to begin. Thomas Jefferson was seeking to expand Virginian and American enterprise westward and south into Kentucky and Tennessee. He had been reading Hutchins’ maps and descriptions from his journeys down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. But Hutchins’ maps weren’t convincing to Jefferson. He had questions. The newly appointed United States Geographer was about to be challenged by Jefferson on his cartography skills. In a 1784 correspondence to Hutchins’, Jefferson writes:

“…Excuse my freedom. I think this an error in your pamphlet and would wish to know from you whether I see it wrong.”

What Jefferson was referring to? Just how far off was their shared understanding of the mass expanse of land that lie just beyond the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers? Together, these two men were about to carve up Indigenous land into neatly ordered surveyed squares of states, counties, townships, real estate – America’s first cadastral maps. But they had no idea what lie before them.

Hello Interactors,

Welcome to spring. We now transition to cartography. This post weaves the story of how I came to study cartography as an undergrad, the challenges of drawing maps, and how a spinning logo led to a mapping feature in Excel.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or feel free to email me directly.

Now let’s go…

I didn’t set out to be a geography major. I didn’t even know the word ‘cartography’. My primary interest in high school was computer graphics. My two favorite subjects in school were math and art and I saw computer graphics as a way to combine them. I was also addicted to MTV. Yes, I was there for the music, but I was also in love with their animated logos.

That’s when I knew what I wanted to do when I grew up. Animate graphics with a computer.

Finding a university to teach me this proved elusive. I ended up following a high school friend to Colorado State where he was already studying graphic design. But toward the end of my fist year, the head of the design department settled with me, “Look Brad, I don’t think you’re going to find what you’re looking for here. You might try California.” So I loaded up the truck and I moved to Beverly. Hill’s, that is. Swimming pools, movie stars.

My cousin lived in L.A., so I moved in with her and her husband. I took a year off, worked, and searched for the right school. By this time, 1985, Dire Strait’s video, ‘Money for Nothing’, had come out. It’s was one of the first ever computer animated videos. It also featured Sting’s familiar cry, “I want my MTV…” I hear you, Sting. I still want my MTV. Having seen this video, I was even more certain of what I wanted to do. In a twist of fate, my cousin helped me land a job as a corporate gopher for a consumer electronics distributor. I was living that line from the ‘Money for Nothing’ video: “We gotta move these color TVs…”

In 1987, the popular computer graphic conference, SIGGRAPH, was in Anaheim so I attended. I was in heaven. These were my people. I found my way to a booth with a cool logo and name: Wavefront Technologies.

The people were cool too. Best yet, they were located in Santa Barbara. I decided I wanted to work for this company, so I headed north and enrolled at University of California, Santa Barbara. Then came the hard part. What do I major in?

Computer graphics was only offered in graduate level computer science courses. That seemed too long and arduous for my taste. I remember sitting there frustrated one day, thumbing through the course catalog my roommate had left open to his major, environmental studies. I saw a class offered by the geography department in mapmaking – cartography. As I looked further I found computer cartography. I soon realized I could learn computer graphics and graphic design through cartography. I then declared geography as my major and was finally on a path to my ultimate goal — Wavefront.

DRAWING ON THE BRAIN TO DRAW MAPS

Drawing maps is difficult. It seems easy. From last week’s post on cognitive maps we learned making maps comes natural to the brain. We all have what we need to draw a map right there in our head, but getting it to come out of our hand and on to paper is challenging. And error prone.

Around the time I started at UCSB, geography professor and mental map legend, Reg Golledge, conducted a study on the ability and accuracy of sketching a map from memory. Inspired by research dating back to the 50’s, the study focused on children. Young people have the cognitive skills to recognize anchor-points in the environment, but lack the skill, expertise, and experience in drawing maps.  

Golledge had an 11 year old boy walk a designated path forward and reverse in his suburban neighborhood just off campus in Goleta, California. He repeated this path over the course of five days and was asked to write down his navigation strategy; including the list of landmarks and features used in his strategy. He then wrote down a list of steps required to complete the journey that another kid his age could understand. And, lastly, he had him draw a map. Similar to the Carr study mentioned last week, the boy was also shown a video of the journey and was asked to anticipate which landmarks would be next in the sequence of his path.  

What Golledge found is that by day five, the boy was able to draw a fairly detailed map of the path. Like the Carr study, the more times the boy walked the path, the more detail the brain was filling in.

As you can see, the origin and destination of the journey were easier to sketch. Over time, other segments progressively filled in over time. But what’s interesting is the gaps found in the boy’s early maps weren’t there in his verbal description of what was to come next in the video. Even in early trials the boy could accurately describe what was coming next in the sequence watching the video, but he couldn’t draw it. His brain had the list of segments neatly ordered in his brain on day one, but drawing them completely and accurately took until day five.

There have been a number of similar studies conducted since. Including other methods of giving directions like pointing to a location with a finger or simply walking someone to a destination. What researchers have concluded about sketch maps is summarized here by Golledge:

“Of these various methods, pointing, sketch mapping, and walking to targets parallel research methodologies that have been used extensively in cognitive mapping. It is significant to note that perhaps the most prominent of these methods - sketching - was found to be among the least reliable! After evaluating nine different ways of indicating direction, [the research] showed that simply using a finger or a device extended like a finger (e.g., a stick) was the most accurate technique.”

It turns out drawing maps is hard.

CHARTING A COURSE IN CARTOGRAPHY

One of the first things I learned in cartography is the best maps are copies an existing one. All of our mapping assignments used translucent paper (vellum) that we would lay over an existing map and trace by hand with a technical pen (Rapidographs). Old school. But I was a rebel. After spending four hours hand drawing a map assignment, I would walk three floors down to the computer lab and crank out the same assignment on a Mac in under an hour. Much to the chagrin of my TA (and now friend), Greg, I would hand both in just to prove a point. Computer cartography was upon us.

But the most valuable lesson Greg taught me wasn’t about how to unclog my pens or how to use the photo enlarger in the dark room to create glossy reproductions of our pen and ink masterpieces. It was how to blend data visualization with mapping. Most of the maps I remember drawing were choropleth maps. These maps are commonplace now. Probably best known for showing ‘red’ and ‘blue’ disparities by region during U.S. elections.

Here’s one from the 2016 election by the New York Times. It gives the illusion that most people in America voted for Trump. The choropleth doesn’t take into account how many people live in each county making the map somewhat misleading.

The New York Times has been doing choropleth election maps since 1896.

In 1992 they added a bar chart to give the reader more information and increased accuracy over just the map alone.

Many of my mapping assignments included charts and graphs as well. Which were also drawn by hand. It would have been impossible for the 1988 me to imagine that just five years down the road I’d be managing a team of designers working on charting in Excel.

I’D RATHER BE SPINNING LOGOS

I wasn’t learning to make maps because I wanted to be a cartographer. Sure I wanted the graphic and information design training, but I was mostly there for computer graphics. Apart from a couple projects on my Commodore Amiga with computer cartography legend Waldo Tobler, my most exciting project came in my senior year. I had secured an internship at my dream company, Wavefront and wanted to make the most of the opportunity.

My senior advisor was Michael Goodchild. Considered a pioneer in Geographic Information Science, he was also kicking off a new academic consortium called the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis (NCGIA). He needed a flashy intro to a promotional video for its launch, so we decided that was my senior project. It was no MTV music video, but I was getting closer to my dream.

I remember once being stuck behind a car in L.A. with a bumper sticker that read, “I’d rather be spinning logos.” I thought to myself, me too. I decided professor Mike needed a spinning logo for his video. So with a little help from my friends at Wavefront, I download a 3D topographic model of Santa Barbara, brought into Wavefront’s 3D animation software, and modelled a nice NCGIA logo that was ripe for spinning. Before long I had the logo soaring over the Santa Barbara foothills as the camera swept down the coast. I high fived Mike, checked the spinning logo off my list, and the next thing I knew I had a job offer from Wavefront. Mission accomplished.

I soon fell in love with designing software more than modelling and animating graphics. I designed and coded the user interface for the Data Visualizer – a 3D science and engineering analysis tool. It was way ahead of its time.

But the success of this product, and Wavefront, hinged on U.S. Department of Defense contracts. It was 1991 and the first Gulf War had broken out, those contracts dried up, and I was laid off. So I headed north to Microsoft in pursuit of a new dream.

CHOROPLETHS FOR THE WORLD

After a long career leading big design and research teams in Office and Windows, I went back to Office in 2014 to manage a smaller team focused on Excel. I was also scratching a decades-old data visualization itch. At the time, Microsoft was also making forays into 3D maps in Excel.

But despite these eye popping graphics, users still couldn’t make a simple map out of geographic data – like a choropleth, for example. So I pushed to change that. Now anybody can make a choropleth in less than a minute. No vellum. No ink. And no dark room. No drawing required, at all.  But they’re very limited maps. Excel can’t yet display two data series in a single map. It turns out making maps is hard, even for Microsoft.

But you can change the mapping projections – how the computer draws a region of a curved surface (earth) onto a two dimensional surface (paper or screen). The Mercator projection is the most popular, and the default, but it skews the size of regions as the get further from the equator. Excel offers alternatives, like the Miller projection. This technique better maintains proportions of regions along the equator, but still has some skewing.

Consider Greenland. This island is typically shown to be way larger than the United States, but that’s because the Mercator projection has skewed its true size. Greenland actually fits inside the United States with room to spare.

To help us decide if Excel should make a statement around proper projection, I reached out to my senior advisor, Mike Goodchild. We hadn’t spoke or seen each other since I spun his logo in 1989. Mike had recently moved to Seattle to be closer to his daughter and her family. She’s Anne Goodchild, a transportation logistics superstar at the University of Washington. While Mike admired our attempt to mend the Mercator mess with a more preferable projection, he felt familiarity would probably be most prudent.

So there you have it. After nearly 30 years since first being introduced to cartography, drawing my first map with pen and paper, and never losing my love for computer graphics, now anybody in the world can draw their own choropleth map. No pen, no ink, and no vellum. But that laser printer is still sitting there ready to show off your mapping skills. Just hit ‘Print’, slip it in a manila folder, and smile at your smug self as you recall from your brain that next segment in a chain of your journey along the earth’s curved plane.

Hello Interactors,

We’re coming up on spring in the northern hemisphere so this post eases us in to cartography — via the brain.

Cognitive maps play an integral role in our ability to interact with place. We don’t even give it much thought, but our brains are amazing cartographers.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or feel free to email me directly.

Now let’s go…

LOCK DOWN. WALK ON.

It was a year ago this month that I started walking. A lot. For me anyway. Last summer I’d walk four or so miles every other day and up to 17 miles on the weekend. I would pull out my phone, launch Google Maps, and look for a patch of green within the city limits of my town, Kirkland, Washington. I would then set out to visit it by foot.

I’ve lived in Kirkland for nearly three decades. Only in this last year do I feel like I really know it. For thirty years I’d wake up, eat breakfast, jump in my car, and commute 6.5 miles to Microsoft. Yes, I’d sometimes bike or bus and I’ve run and biked around Kirkland many times. But, honestly, I haven’t really lived in Kirkland, I’ve mostly just slept here. If anything, I’ve mostly lived on its roads.

It’s a common pattern in America. Climb in a car and hit the road on your daily commute. The lockdown has disrupted that routine for those of us fortunate enough to work from home. Many, including me, don’t miss the commute. But others, I’ve heard, miss having the alone time that comes with the Single-Occupancy Vehicle. Zooming has taken on new meaning these days, but there’s something satisfying about zooming along alone in your thoughts in a climate controlled capsule caressing the concrete. I think we’ve probably all experienced those moments when you realize you have no recollection of the last mile or so of driving. We are literally lost in our thoughts.

But you’re taking it all in whether you know it or not. Your brain does not like being lost, so it makes sure your eyes are capturing images of your surroundings. It uses those images to build a map in your brain – a cognitive map. The commuter’s cognitive map is special map based on the path of your commute. Each successive trip further imprints those images into your brain while filling gaps in between. It’s building a coherent collection of ordered memories. Unknowingly, the brain stores a collection of anchor-points that are reliably recalled should the need arise to alter your interaction with place.

TURN LEFT AT THE WATERTOWER

In 1969, MIT Urban Design professor and practitioner, Stephen Carr and Northeastern University Psychology professor, Dale Schissler, conducted an experiment to better understand how we build up impressions of a place. They started by interviewing commuters in the Boston area, including passengers. They had them relive their journeys and recorded environmental cues they recalled. For example, a sign, a building, or a tree. The next day they strapped a camera to their head with an optical device pointing at the cornea of their eye. They wanted to see exactly what the commuters saw and where exactly they were looking. I’m not sure what it was like strapping a 1960’s era camera to the head, but it probably looked like this Evans and Sutherland virtual reality contraption from 1960:

While on their journey, commuters where prompted to verbally describe landmarks that were recorded by the researchers. Days later, they showed the commuters the images they observed along with film footage from the trip and had them again identify landmarks on their journey. The researchers tallied which images were recalled by each set of commuters and determined these as meaningful landmarks. What they found is the number of meaningful landmarks varied among those new to the area, routine commuters, and passengers.

The average driver, including those new to the area, recalled 10 objects over a four mile section of the trip. Passengers recalled 21. And routine commuters were able to recall 28. But there was one thing they all had in common. They remembered similar images and in the same order. Routine commuters were adding more detail and filling in gaps, but appeared to be using the same anchor-points as a drivers new to the area.

This is a significant finding. It suggests our brain is reliable at building a cognitive map made of anchor-points – even if the path is unfamiliar to us. We use these anchor-points as orientation should we need to recall them at a later time. It also demonstrates our ability to learn and modify our path and our image of a city over time.

IT’S IN THE BRAIN

Nearly a decade later, in 1978, neuroscientist John O’Keefe had a similar curiosity of cognitive maps. Instead of tracking and measuring the mechanics of the eye, he probed and measured the cellular activity of the brain. By implanting microelectrodes into the hippocampus region of a lab rat’s brain, he was able to record electrical signals emitted from their brain cells as they navigated a maze in search of food.

These cells were mostly inactive until the rat happened upon a particular place. A cell would fire and continue firing until it left this region. O’Keefe then implanted other electrodes into other cells and discovered some would come to life when others fell dormant. He discovered three classes of cells that harmonize with one another in assisting the rats through the maze:

* Cells for location in space: where in the environment the mouse was.

* Cells for orientation: which direction the mouse was facing.

* Cells for distance: the distance between anchor-points.

This trio of harmonized cellular electricity embedded in the center of the brain is another way of describing a cognitive map. O’Keefe won a Nobel Prize for his discovery.

The field of neuroscience continued on O’Keefe’s path. Now equipped with brain imaging capabilities, scientists have gone on to visualize these phenomena in real-time. And what they have discovered are many more classes of engaged cells than just the three O’Keefe identified. It’s not a trio after all. It’s a symphony. And it’s not residing just inside the hippocampus, but throughout the brain. As enamored we are with our phones with gyroscopes and GPS, they’re nothing compared to an animal’s navigational system. Shane O’Mara is a neuroscientist currently doing experimental brain research at Trinity College Dublin. He notes,

“…there are many other cell types contributing to our sense of space. Place cells signal where you are; head direction cells signal where you are heading; the boundary cells…tell you about the edges of the environment; and grid cells provide a metric for space. In addition to the core GPS system, there are other cells that signal distance to objects, speed of the head and body movement, and your relative upright position. So our picture of our brain is becoming much more complex.”

But another discovery O’Keefe made with his food seeking anesthetized maze rats, is that their cellular GPS had a far weaker signal when the rat was pulled through the maze on a trolley. What I realize now is that after nearly three decades of commuting, my brain has an over-developed path-based cognitive map of a 13 mile round trip commute from home to work and back. In fact, my cognitive map of the entire region is comprised of paths derived from a drive through a road network as I sat silently in a seat speeding down the street.

It turns out walking and cognitive mapping are mutually dependent systems that are only optimized when done together. Driving or riding as a passenger are poor substitutes for enhancing our interactions with place. In the words of Shane O’Mara,

“The brain’s navigational and mapping and memory systems are so intertwined as to be almost one and the same. Walking to somewhere depends on the brain’s navigational system, and in turn walking provides a vast amount of ongoing information to the brain’s mapping and navigation systems. These are mutually enriching and reinforcing systems.”

This explains why walking around Kirkland over the last year has introduced me to a city I’ve known for nearly 30 years. And walking has not only enriched my cognitive map, it’s enriched the love of my environment and my own emotional well-being. Walking makes us happy.

WALK AND WHISTLE

In a 2016 study out of Iowa State University (Go Cyclones), researchers Jeffrey Conrath Miller and Zlatan Krizan demonstrated walking yields happiness in a simple study of college students. They presented one set of students pictures of buildings on campus while seated indoors in a lab. They asked them to describe the aesthetic qualities of the buildings in the pictures and also their emotion state at the time. They then asked another set of students to walk around campus in search of those same buildings and had them record their aesthetic impressions and self-reported feelings.  What they found is represented in the title of their paper: “Walking facilitates positive affect”, and their second discovery is offered in parenthesis, “(even when expecting the opposite).” It turns out that even those students who dreaded the thought of walking around campus self-reported being happier having done it.

This is a limited study with a small sample size, but longer range studies with significant populations have demonstrated positive mental health effects from walking. A 2017 study by public health researchers out of Australia tracked nearly 34,000 people over eleven years. They wanted to know what effects exercise has on preventing depression, how much intensity is required to have an effect, and what causes the effects. They found that just one hour a week of walking could prevent 12% of cases of onset depression by otherwise healthy adults. Imagine what walking an hour a day would do.

COVID has drawn many people out of their house to walk. There hasn’t been much else to do. Some of these people may have even dreaded it. It’s possible this is one positive outcome of this pandemic. As frustrating as the lockdown has been, perhaps walking has prevented a sizable number of people from succumbing to sedentary induced depression.

Our cities don’t make it easy to walk. A century of car culture has kept people from interacting with place. We can deduce from the research I’ve cited, that this is a bad thing. Not only do we have a biased and hazy image built in our minds of the environment in which we live, sitting in a car or a chair does not facilitate happy thoughts.

We all succumb to what those Iowa State researchers referred to as the ‘dread effect’. It’s all too easy to tap that green square on Google maps, hit the ‘walking distance’ tab, shutter at the time and effort it would take to walk, and then grab the keys and drive there. But for the last year, I instead grabbed my headphones, took a step, and felt the cells in my brains come alive. I am interacting with place, with a smile on my face, as a cranial cellular symphony traces a map of the space.

References:

Shane O’Mara. In Praise of Walking

Reginald G. Golledge;Robert J. Stimson. Spatial Behavior: A Geographic Perspective

Hello Interactors,

More Microsoft history and it’s role in the growth of itself, other companies around the world, and our pervasive connections to each other and the internet.

I was lucky to play a small part in this transformation. I did my best to understand the behavior of people using the software that fueled these expansions. It taught me lessons I’m now applying to understanding behavior of people interacting with place.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community. I welcome your participation.

Interplace is a place for people to interact so please leave your comments below or feel free to email me directly.

Now let’s go…

MICROSERFS

In my early days at Microsoft, the place felt more like a startup. I had come from a company of 120 people, so 11,000 people should have felt huge. But compared to the 168,000 of today, it was small. The culture was different too. People were there to make something – not to be somebody. This attitude is best ensconced in Douglas Coupland’s 1995 novel, Microserfs. Set on Microsoft’s forested campus, it gives a peek into ‘geek culture’ of the early 90s. It also exposes the heartfelt belief that we really were doing something meaningful.

“What is the search for the next great compelling application but a search for the human identity?”

“Maybe thinking you're supposed to 'have a life' is a stupid way of buying into an untenable 1950s narrative of what life *supposed* to be. How do we know that all of these people with 'no lives' aren't really on the new frontier of human sentience and preceptions?” – Douglas Coupland, Microserfs

When this book came out, Windows 95 was just starting up.

PC sales were revving. Selling at the rate of 40 Million per year it’s success pushed Intel’s revenue growth to 41% in a single year. And the promise of the World Wide Web was taking hold. Bill’s book, The Road Ahead, had come out and he had a vision. That vision was expressed in a keynote at COMDEX, a popular technology conference. The concept was called, ‘Information at your Fingertips’ and he needed a murder mystery movie to tell the story.

My team designed the PC desktop interactions in this video. We imagined what interactions would be like in 2005. At one point in the video, Bill jokingly refers to our work as a ‘rather cluttered desktop’. Soon after you’ll see Bill introducing long file names and video conferencing. But in 1995, that meant video conferencing with somebody in a public phone booth!

People around the world were buying in to Bill’s vision — including major corporations and governments. Businesses multiplied PC growth. And so did connectivity. Bill’s vision of a PC on every desk was coming true. Connecting computers to the internet really did put information at your fingertips.

Buying a PC in 1995 was the entry price to a new world of communication. Windows 95 made connecting to the internet easy, Office 95 simplified sending email, and the Internet Explorer let you, well, explore the internet. Information was not just gingerly touching the tips of fingers. Hands were cupped and people were scooping up tiny bits of addictive bytes and gorging themselves. We still are. In 1996 36 million people were on the internet. By 2000 it grew tenfold to 360 million. A decade later it jumped to two billion. Estimates now put that number at around four billion – over half of the world’s population. A reminder of the advantage and privilege half the world holds over the other half.

GROW BABY GROW

Satisfying this growing appetite for information required more than software. Cables needed to be run, server farms needed built, and somebody had to manage all this information and technology. Enter the IT Manager. IT had been around for some time already, but installing, managing, and controlling access to Windows, Office, and all these PCs and peripherals put real strains on IT departments. So did the need to control access to the exponential growth of documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. Other comparable modes of communication, like snail mail and telephones, only grew at a rate of around 10% over a much longer period of time.

The expansion of IT departments mirrored this curve. Digital connection and communication between people inside companies fuels the same ingenuity that physical connections do in dense cities. The bigger the city, the more innovation occurs. Successful cities attract talented and conscientious people generating superlinear population growth and creativity. It’s why bigger cities and bigger companies have bigger stockpiles of patents.

“Just as bounded growth in biology follows from the sublinear scaling of metabolic rate, the superlinear scaling of wealth creation and innovation (as measured by patent production, for example) leads to unbounded, often faster-than-exponential growth consistent with open-ended economies.”

– Geoffrey West. Scale: The Universal Laws of Life, Growth, and Death in Organisms, Cities, and Companies.

To accommodate this growth, the infrastructure must scale accordingly. But whether it’s an ethernet cable plugged in to a PC, a copper pipe connected to a toilet, or the capillaries feeding those information seeking fingertips the endpoints all start small. Universally small. Be it Boston, Bamako, or Bangladesh, the clear plastic fitting at the end of that network cable is the same. The diameter of piping connected to the toilet is also roughly the same. So are the smallest blood vessels in every human’s freakishly flexible fingers all they way down to their tiny typing tips. All of which connect to progressively larger conduits that accommodate increasing amounts of data, water, or blood. All the way to massive data gateways, waterworks plants, and plasma pumping hearts.

“The pipe that connects your house to the water line in the street and the electrical line that connects it to the main cable are analogs of capillaries, while your house can be thought of as an analog to cells. Similarly, all employees of a company, viewed as terminal units, have to be supplied by resources (wages, for example) and information through multiple networks connecting them with the CEO and the management.”

– Geoffrey West. Scale: The Universal Laws of Life, Growth, and Death in Organisms, Cities, and Companies.

It’s the work of fractals and the power of sublinear scaling. It’s what makes an elephant live longer than mouse, and companies like Microsoft to live longer than most startups. But an elephant is also big and slow, and so are big companies.

As the year 2000 approached, other growing companies suffered the same fate of growth. The burden of managing these layers of modern administration increased the total cost of ownership of assets. The cost of managing equipment, software, and data, exceeded the cost of the software used to create it. Office 97 was deemed ‘good enough’ by the industry. This meant every new feature we added only diminished the return on their investment. Microsoft Office faced the same fate natural organisms do – a growth plateau.

POWER TO THE PEOPLE

This marked a notable shift in our approach to user research. Instead of focusing entirely on the tasks and activities of individual end users, we had new problems to consider: reducing the total cost of ownership and increasing the return on existing investments. Our infamous attempt at expanding menus in Office was one such example. Instead of a bottoms-up ‘geek culture’ approach to software development that was tied to individual needs and desires, we were looking through the lens of IT managers and business decision makers.

Meanwhile, the kind of things people were doing in Office was expanding and diversifying. We discovered people used Excel for everything from poetry to programming. Word users made love letters and legal documents. We were constantly surprised by how people used Office. I recall a site visit where we observed an office manager at a car dealership using Word. She was making a flyer to post in the break room. We watched as she created a new document, typed and formatted some text, spent a few minutes laying it out, and then hit ‘Print’. What happened next surprised us. She closed Word, and was dutifully prompted to save her document. To our amazement, she declined. We politely interjected, “You just lost all your work!” She responded, “No I didn’t, it’s sitting right there on the printer.”

As we observed more and more behavior we found ourselves looking across individual use cases in search of commonalities. We would cluster and clump collections of behaviors into buckets with names like, “Create”, “Communicate”, “Synthesize“, and “Collaborate”. Before long we distanced ourselves from those individual behaviors. The language became obtuse and abstract. The knowledge of how people were using the product on the ground became mediated through layers of corporate administration.

There were decisions being made among the ‘corporate elite’ in corporation that had measurable impacts on how people were using Office. Decisions that impacted their satisfaction of our product and of their livelihood. But much of that became insulated from us. IT didn’t much like Microsoft researching their employees. Knowledge of how real people did real things in real ways was information just beyond our fingertips.

STRIKING THE BALANCE

The same effects of scaling occur in cities as well.  Small towns are like startups. They have their own version of ‘geek culture’; transcendental motivators that rally a group around something bigger than themselves. As the city grows, it too attracts the best and brightest. And as the population grows, so does the infrastructure needed to sustain it. The close interactions of smart talented people yields new innovations that generate revenue and attract more talent. City growth seems to be impervious to scaling laws. Luis Bettencourt, a physicist and complexity scientist who studies cities, calls them ‘social reactors’. By his estimation, there’s only one thing in nature that behaves like cities. The sun. In a Santa Fe Institute interview by host Michael Garfield , Bettencourt says,

“…the only system that has sort of these properties that I know of exist in nature that concentrates things, increases interaction rates and admits products at a rate that's higher, per unit of mass is the sun, is a star and that's a reactor, right?”

Researchers have been observing and understanding the behavior of people and place for centuries. And they too have struggled with the same things I did trying to understand the behavior of people using complex systems like Office. Studying people on the ground indeed yields insights at a micro-level. But after collecting and amassing mounds of data patterns emerge, generalizations are made, and soon they’re looking at humans in the aggregate.

Researching at the macro level-begins with agglomerated aggregate. But patterns also emerge. Moreover, it allows for the study of behavior of decision makers, policy writers, and power brokers. These decision makers work together to convive, concoct and sometimes conspire ways of influencing the outcomes of organizations. It’s important we study how planning and long term execution of coordinated strategies impact the world. Only then will hidden influences of our economic and political systems emerge. In synthesizing decades of human geography research by social scientists, researchers Reginald Golledge and Robert Stimson came to this conclusion:

“It was found that the long-term plans and objectives of Western capitalist societies often benefited small, elite groups of capitalists more than they benefited people with low incomes and that planning for personal welfare diverged widely among capitalist and socialist and social-welfare economies. Decision making at the macro level was thus defined as a constrained process, undertaken and implemented by a powerful elite, often encompassing goals that differentially considered segments of society or economy.”

– Reginald G. Golledge and Robert J. Stimson. Spatial Behavior: A Geographic Perspective

Understanding human behavior is a challenging and dynamical undertaking. After all, in the words of Douglas Coupland,

“What is human behavior, except trying to prove that we're not animals?”

I’m not convinced we’re smart enough to fully understand or describe human behavior. It’s like looking through a telescope with one eye and a microscope with the other and then coherently explaining what you see. But it does involve a little bit of both of these techniques. It requires us to sit with people in their context to fully grasp the how their physical environment impacts their work, lives, attitudes, and beliefs. When you see someone, as I did, straight out of college sitting in a broom closet with a desk and a laptop using Excel for 10 hours a day, it’s hard to un-see.

Somebody in ‘corporate’ decided it was a good idea to put a human in a closet to work. Like an animal. It’s essential we understand why people do these, and much, much worse things to other people. Every organization has a group, or two, of just a few people with a privileged view. They reckon and wrangle, poke and prod, and wager which message to tangle and skew. I’ve been there, I know, they impact me and they impact you.

The same is true in the cities we live. And the regions and counties and countries, too. By trying to know all we can know and showing the world what we’re we willing to show, a bigger vessel of understanding can flow. In the words of Reg Golledge and Robert Stimson,

“A paradigm for examining human-environment settings needs to encompass a complex set of relevant variables and their functional relationships. It includes the physical and the built aspects of environment; it allows for roles of culture and its related social and political systems and institutions; it identifies the evolution of culture over time through technology; and it recognizes intervening psychological processes as filtering mechanisms in how humanity perceives the environment and acts within it.”

Our collective behavior has fueled a rate and pace of growth that we cannot survive. Microsoft, as a company, has survived longer than most. Looking at over 22,000 U.S. companies, from 1950 to 2009, only half made it past 10 years. I’m half way to 60 and many scientists would agree that I’m as old as the Anthropocene – a geological epoch marked by the negative impact our behavior is having on the planet. The majority of my life has been spent molding and understanding the behavior of people behind a computer screen – billions of finger tips making, taking, and shaping information through software. My one wish is that they, we, look at our reflection in that screen and ask, “Will my current behavior allow the next two generations to survive?”