Leif Gehrmann

Cantographs

2025-12-31T00:00:00+00:00

What would it look like if song lyrics were positioned and stretched on a timeline based on the audio’s timestamp and duration? I was curious, so I created a visualisation for a couple of songs to see what it looks like.

Below is a simple example of the simple tune Daisy Bell, digitally recreated by a DECtalk Speech Synthesizer.

Daisy Bell, written by Harry Dacre, recording by JapanYoshi, licensed under CC0 1.0, available on Wikimedia Commons (View in fullscreen)

Press the play button and watch the cursor travel from left to right, matching the time to the actual spoken word. As the song plays, notice how some of the words and syllables are elongated or shortened. Each line in the visualisation represents 7.1 seconds, which I setup deliberately so that each line of the song isn’t interrupted, and the rhyme scheme is obvious (“Do”, “You”, and “Two”).

The visualisation is also interactive! While it’s playing, press the words and it will skip the music to that point in time.

That example was pretty basic, and also synthesised. To see what it looks like with a human singer, here’s Tom Lehrer’s The Elements, sung to the tune of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Modern Major-General’s Song.

The Elements by Tom Lehrer, licensed under CC0 1.0, available on TomLehrerSongs.com (Archive.org) (View in fullscreen)

There’s not much rhyming, but you can literally see how Tom Lehrer manages to shrink some very complex words into a short amount of time. But unlike the previous song, this song doesn’t have a clear timing-structure.

So to see a visualisation with more structure, we should look for a more conventional song featuring verses and chorus. Next is Jonathan Coulton’s Artificial Heart:

Artificial Heart by Jonathan Coulton, licensed under CC BY-NC 3.0, available on JonathanCoulton.com (View in fullscreen)

In this example I’ve highlighted the verses in yellow and the chorus sections in red. This song is notable for featuring two tempos, which produces a strange visualisation. You’ll notice that the first and second verses are aligned, whereas the other sections are not. I setup the visualisation to display each line as 5.95 seconds long, so the moment the chorus comes in at a higher tempo, the text no longer aligns.

Next, a song by David Byrne, which features sustained vocals, especially at the end.

My Fair Lady by David Byrne, licensed under CC SAMPLING+ 1.0, available on Free Music Archive (View in fullscreen)

Next, Machine Love by Jamie Paige, which is lyrically dense and includes some Japanese lyrics.

Machine Love by Jamie Paige, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 3.0, available on Bandcamp (View in fullscreen)

With this song, I represented background vocals as lines underneath the primary text. The text in Japanese I coloured differently to make it stand out.

I wish I could use more well known songs, but that would require a license for both the song recording and the song composition/lyrics. I’m grateful that the artists above have shared their work in the creative commons. But I hope these examples are a good sample of what various songs would look like when visualised this way.

But if you’re wanting more, here’s 5 more songs.

Now Get Ready by Beastie Boys
- Licensed under CC NC-SAMPLING+ 1.0
- Available on Free Music Archive
Oslodum by Gilberto Gil
- Licensed under CC SAMPLING+ 1.0
- Available on Free Music Archive
Get Scrappy! by The Crystal Furs
- Licensed under CC BY-NC 3.0
- Available on Bandcamp
Taken For A Ride by TomboFry
- Used with permission
- Available on Bandcamp
misaki nakahara by kinoue64
- Licensed under CC BY-NC 3.0
- Available on Bandcamp

Click the images below to view/listen to them.

Inspiration

I was inspired to create these visualisations because of two things I discovered in 2025.⁠^[1]

The front page and an excerpt from the Alternative Layout System book.

First I came across the Alternative Layout System by Giliane Cachin and INT studio, which explores different ways to handle typographical problems like hyphenation in latin script.⁠^[2] I was particularly inspired by “Same Sizer” and “Ext. Word & Letter”. For example, “Same Sizer” puts each word into a grid, and stretches the word to fit within each grid cell.

Apple Music on iPhone, showing timed-text lyrics for the song Machine Love by Jamie Paige.⁠^[3] The text lights up in sync with the song, like in this example with the word "reveal", which the singer takes 3 seconds to sing.

Secondly, I came across Apple’s technical documentation on how they encode timed-lyrics data. This is used for a feature in Apple Music, as shown in the screenshot above. Apple’s format is based on the W3C spec called Timed Text Markup language, or TTML. The format is relatively easy to parse, where sections of the song are annotated with Apple’s song-part attribute (i.e. Verse/Chorus/Intro/Outro), each line is attributed to an agent (i.e. one or more singers), and each phrase, word, or syllable is given a begin or end attribute to indicate how long the sound lasts.

<div itunes:song-part="Chorus">
  ...
  <p ttm:agent="v1">
    <span begin="03:04.834" end="03:05.191">My</span>
    <span begin="03:05.191" end="03:05.531">love,</span>
    <span begin="03:05.871" end="03:06.220">I</span>
    <span begin="03:06.220" end="03:06.469">give</span>
    <span begin="03:06.469" end="03:06.921">you</span>
    <span begin="03:06.921" end="03:07.208">my</span>
    <span begin="03:07.208" end="03:07.610">grand</span>
    <span begin="03:07.610" end="03:07.959">re</span><span
          begin="03:07.959" end="03:10.763">veal</span>
  </p>
  ...
</div>

Other formats for timed text exist; There are plenty of formats for karaoke or subtitling systems. But TTML is easily extendable, which is very handy for my purposes.

I extended the TTML format with my own attributes, which is how I’m able to customise the colours and – importantly – the length and offset of each line in the visualisation. See the example below of the latter.

<body
  dur="02:33.379"
  lg:wrap-duration="5.95"
  lg:offset-duration="2.6"
>
  ...
</body>

To see a full example, see the TTML file for Machine Love.

Prior Art

I’ve not seen anyone implement something specifically like this before, so I don’t know if this concept already has a name.⁠^[4]

So I’ve decided to call these visual displays cantographs. I believe the term was coined by Greta Boesel, an artist who has used melodies and songs to create visual art. I came across her work by searching online for the word “cantograph”, by combining various greek or latin words.⁠^[5] I really like her rendition of an Icelandic hymn from the 13th century called Heyr himna smiður, which also includes a legend describing her artistic process behind the piece. Her work uses abstract shapes and colours compared to my renditions which is just text and colours, so it’s not quite the same spirit, but I hope it’s reasonable that it falls under the same umbrella of “visual song representation”.

Further Thoughts

There are many ways this concept could be expanded upon, but would require a lot more dedication to implement. Here are some ideas I’ve had:

On the left, a cantograph with differently shaped sections which allows for multiple tempos. Top-right, a sample of different fonts. Bottom-right, the words "Hebrew" (עִברִית) and "Arabic" (العربية) in their respective scripts, notable for being read right-to-left, with some syllables elongated.

Some songs have varying tempos, like Jonathan Coulton’s Artificial Heart. To handle the changes in tempo, the visualisation could be split into sections consisting of lines with varying lengths. That way the blocks of text can be aligned without changing the alignment of the rest of the verses and choruses. The image above on the left shows what that might look like.

All of the examples I’ve shared use the same sans-serif font. I tried other fonts styles like serif and monospace, but found sans-serif to be more legible; With the right font one might get nicer results. I also made the text upper-case, for the same legibility reasons. Variable fonts could be used to stretch the text, instead of my method using the lengthAdjust attribute in SVG.

I was also thinking how my cantograph could be applied to other languages and scripts. Hebrew and Arabic would need to go right-to-left to make sense; Likewise Mongolian script would be vertical. That would be a simple⁠^[6] fix for my code to change the rendering of text…

Illustrations used in the cantograph for Gilberto Gil's Oslodum. On the left, an homage to Rubem Valentim art showing Xangô's axe and Thor's hammer. On the right, Scandinavian imagery.

The visualisations don’t have to just be text. An artist could embed illustrations within the visualisation. I’ve tried this already with Gilberto Gil’s song Oslodum, which is about Gil visiting the city Oslo, Norway. Paying homage to another Afro-Brazilian artist that I like, Rubem Valentim, I used Valentim’s imagery of the Yoruba deity Xangô (Whom Gil likens to the Norse god Thor in the song), along with some Scandinavian imagery of a cod (which Gil mentions in the song), a star (selburose), and a viking ship. I tried to make the overall imagery match Valentim’s geometric shapes, which happens to play well with the design of the cantograph’s rectangular text blocks.⁠^[7]

On the left, a video demonstrating a cantograph in the shape of a vinyl record. On the right, Belle, Bonne, Sage, by Baude Cordier.

The lines of text could also be visualised in some other form. In the video above on the left, I tried displaying the lyrics to the song Daisy Bell in a shape of a vinyl record. On the right, is an example of “Eye Music” from the 15th century by Baude Cordier which depicts a heart-shaped staff. Musicologist Jordan Alexander Key created an animation of it being sung.

On the left, a quote⁠^[8] formatted in the shape of a heart; Interpreting it as a Cantograph, one would read the text with several long pauses in between. On the right, a visualisation of the song Daisy Bell, where the lyrics are additionally positioned vertically according to the note.

Perhaps the cantograph could even reflect back onto the musician’s songwriting. The musician could deliberately construct imagery which then decides the timing-structure of their song. My example above on the left shows a piece where a singer deliberately spaces their words to form an image in the shape of a heart. This is essentially a form of steganography. It’s probably very uncomfortable to listen to… 😅

Another idea could be adding annotations to indicate the pitch the singer is singing. My example above on the right shows a very basic tune. So I imagine this concept could get very complex for other songs.

Final Thought

I think there are many possibilities with this type of visualisation that could give existing songs a renewed perspective, and allow the listener to see lyrical patterns that otherwise are hidden in sound. Visualising this data is fun! That said, it is an abstract way of interpreting the music; Atomised, robotic, and artificial. The heart is in the music, and it’s what the artist originally intended for the listener.

The source code for my TTML visualiser can be found on Codeberg.

Footnotes

^ Actually there was a third thing that inspired me. Earlier in 2025, the YouTuber Matt Parker published a video analysing how some other popular YouTubers will fake the progress bar in the sponsored segments of their videos to retain viewers. Basically, the progress bars would start off progressing fast, but gradually get slower. Then another YouTuber called Noel Friedrich published two videos showing different techniques for speeding and stretching the videos that would "Fix" the issue (Part 1, Part 2). I recommend checking out all three of the links! The whole concept motivated me to do this project, although I had thought about my concept for a long time already.
^ Speaking of hyphenation, I learned recently that other scripts have features to "stretch" their words to work around this similar issue. While at an exhibition by Michael Rakowitz, specifically his project I’m good at love, I’m good at hate, it’s in between I freeze, I came across a book he had on display by Leonard Cohen titled کتاب اشتیاق (Book of Longing) which features a justified title using the Kashida/Tatweel. Since then I've also learned that some Hebrew text uses a similar style of elongating glyphs in the Torah which Jen Taylor Friedman describes in more detail.
^ Machine Love on Apple Music does not actually have any timed text. So this image is actually a mockup I created. I couldn't find any songs with timed text that were actually in the Creative Commons on Apple Music, so I had to fake it.
^ I am aware of eye music and graphic notation, but those definitions I think implies an intent by the artist to create a graphical output. All of my visualisations are of songs created by artists that did not have this intention. Plus, I was hoping for a more narrow term than just "graphical music", focusing on the text, not just the musical notes.
^ Other terms I came up with were stichograph, tragoúdigram, cantogram (which is unfortunately already a commercial product), audiogram, and many more, but none of the online search results really matched what I was looking for.
^ Except for Arabic. In my TTML visualiser the vowels and consonants are broken up into blocks of <span> elements. That will break the cursiveness of Arabic script. For example, العربية looks very different from ا ل ع ر ب ي ة, despite the fact that it's the same characters, except one has spaces in between, which is what would happen if I added a <span> element against each character.
^ Valentim's work has important religious and anti-colonial themes. I hope my pastiche of his work is not interpreted as a trivialisation of his work. Instead, like Gilberto Gil's song expresses, I wish it to be an expression of cultural appreciation and exchange.
^ The quote is from Chesterfield's Letters to His Son, by the Earl of Chesterfield. I dislike the quote, as it's a very superficial attitude to have. But I also couldn't hesitate the play on words relating to cantographs, which are to a degree superficial! 😅

Digital Kaleidoscopes

2024-12-24T00:00:00+00:00

I made a kaleidoscope! You can try it out for yourself by visiting this website. For best results, try it out on a phone or tablet so you can move around with the camera.

The video below is a demonstration of what you can create with it.

Some more examples of the kaleidoscope in action.

While creating the kaleidoscope, I learned a few interesting things which gave me a greater appreciation of kaleidoscopes. They are more than meets the eye.⁠^[1] The rest of this post is a collection of notes and explanations about kaleidoscopes, including a mildly interesting observation about “non-tessellating” kaleidoscopes.

Physical kaleidoscopes

A quick history on Kaleidoscopes. David Brewster is credited for discovering the optical instrument between 1814-1815 while experimenting on the polarisation of light using mirrors. In 1819 he published a book called A Treatise on the Kaleidoscope which can be viewed at the Internet Archive.

Excerpts from David Brewster's A Treatise on the Kaleidoscope.
Photos taken from the National Library of Scotland.

There are many kinds of kaleidoscopes. The Brewster Kaleidoscope Society has a nice overview of some the types of scopes.

The type of kaleidoscope I created is a teleidoscope, because the viewer’s environment is used as the kaleidoscope image. This is in contrast to the more common cell kaleidoscope, where small loose objects are held up close to the kaleidoscope (which can be rotated or shaken). Teleidoscopes are bit more complex, because they require a ball lens to refract the light from the environment in such a way that the image is focused into the scope. Without the lens, the mirrors will reflect different parts of the environment at different angles, not resulting in a kaleidoscopic pattern.⁠^[2]

Two teleidoscopes,⁠^[3] featuring a ball lens.

A video demonstration of a teleidoscope.

From the video above, the reflections in the teleidoscope are decent, but not perfect. The ball lens does not refract light perfectly into the scope at all angles. The edges of the mirrors are also quite noticeable as blurry white lines, but I think that’s because the toy is cheaply manufactured. A more expensive kaleidoscope might have better results. Regardless, the effects are nice to look at, and the imperfections have a degree of charm.

Kaleidoscope shapes

Most kaleidoscopes I’ve seen use 3 mirrors.

Kaleidoscopes can consist of just 1 or 2 mirrors, but they aren’t as popular as toys. The applications of 1 mirror is limited. With 2 mirrors, some nice symmetrical patterns can be created, but only with rotational symmetry around a single point. With 3 or 4 mirrors, which David Brewster called polycentral kaleidoscopes, patterns can extend infinitely in all directions when the eye looks into the prism.

This post focuses on polycentral kaleidoscopes as, in my opinion, they are the more interesting type of kaleidoscope.

Reflections using one, two, and three mirrors.
(Open in new window)

Before reading up on kaleidoscopes, I didn’t know how many mirror arrangements existed for polycentral kaleidoscopes. I assumed any triangular configuration would work, but that’s not the case.

It turns out there are only four mirror arrangements, or shapes:

Equilateral triangle (60-60-60 triangle)
Rectangle (of any dimension)
Halved-square triangle (90-45-45 triangle)
Halved-equilateral triangle (90-60-30 triangle)

Only a limited number of shapes tessellate to produce kaleidoscopic patterns.

These shapes have the property of edge tessellation. They are able to reflect, tessellate, and have no obtuse angles.

How the four kaleidoscope shapes appear in practice.

Recreating the kaleidoscopic effect digitally

Warning: In this next section I cover a bunch of maths and problem solving. Feel free to skip it, or enjoy the colourful 🌈 – and dizzying 😵‍💫 – images.

To imitate a kaleidoscope using computer graphics, I needed an algorithm that would convert any input image into a sequence of tiles, with a particular arrangement of reflections and rotations.

Let’s first observe how a static image (consisting of red shades on the x-axis and green shades on the y-axis) appears through the kaleidoscope for the four images.

Our input image, that we'll use to explore the problem. The image is masked by the four kaleidoscope shapes that we'll use as tiles in the kaleidoscope.

The effects of different kaleidoscope shapes using the same input image.

Looks pretty! …but it is hard to understand what’s going on. I promise that the problem has a degree of similarity for each of the four shapes, but let’s focus on one shape for now.

Take for example the equilateral triangle pattern:

A physicist like David Brewster would derive the pattern by performing repeated reflections of the image along the edges of the shape. Each reflection is a bounce on one of the three mirrors.

The image sequence below demonstrates how the image would appear for each bounce.

Light bounces in an equilateral kaleidoscope, with the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc. bounces of light. Tip: Click & drag on the image to show how light rays bounce in the scope.
(Open in new window)

But computing how light bounces is inefficient, especially when the light would need to bounce dozens of times in a very long tube.

Instead, knowing the pattern in advance, we can simplify the problem as a direct geometric calculation.

For example, I noticed with the equilateral triangle, the problem can be reduced to calculating the distance and angle around points in a hexagonal grid. Observe in the image below how the pattern repeats itself in the form of a hexagon.

Stepping back, a hexagonal pattern emerges from individual equilateral triangles.

The centroid of each hexagon can be calculated using matrix multiplication. RedBlobGames.com, a website notorious for game development tutorials, has extensive documentation on the subject of hex grids.

Now notice how in the image above that the colours on the 6 corners of the hexagon go from red, to green, and then back to red; three times, in a 120° pattern. We can hopefully write a function that describes this repeating pattern.

This is the second piece of the puzzle, which requires us to find a function that translates any point inside the hexagon in such a way that the original equilateral triangle is rotated and reflected 6 times inside the hexagon.

In other words, we want to map the point P to the point Pʹ, where Pʹ is a point on our original input image. This transformation consisting of rotations and reflections can be described using the following mathematical terms:

The angle θ is the angle between the x-axis from the centre of the hexagon, to the point P. To get the transformed angle θʹ for Pʹ, the absolute function and the modulo function can be used.

I’m leaving out a whole lot of detail, but the gist is we’re able to translate screen coordinates into input-image coordinates without a lot of “if-this; else-that” complexity.

And now that we’re able to translate any point to a point on the original input image, we can write software that computes each pixel of a large image with quick speed (In computer graphics, these are called pixel shaders). This would otherwise be very time consuming to compute if we simulated how light bounced in a real kaleidoscope!

The original image is now reflected and rotated hundreds of times.

The other 3 kaleidoscope shapes can be reduced to a similar problem of 1) finding the centre-point of a grid of hexagons/squares, and 2) translating a coordinate within that grid cell to a point on the input image.

What about unconventional kaleidoscope shapes?

While David Brewster correctly identified those four shapes as having the tessellating effect, he didn’t go into much detail about other shapes. I tried to look for any literature trying more than 3 or 4 mirrors in a kaleidoscope, but I had no success.⁠^[4]

So what about other shapes?

Hexagons tessellate, so why don’t hexagons work?

Pentagons don’t tessellate, so what would happen if 5 mirrors were used?

To answer this, I created another digital version of the kaleidoscope that uses “path tracing” to simulate how light bounces around in real life. This is a slower way of calculating how a kaleidoscope behaves, but it’s more realistic. I’ve published this second kaleidoscope online, but be warned that it does not work on iOS and Android.⁠^[5]

Let’s take a look at the pentagon first.

The graphic below demonstrates how light reflects inside a tube of 5 mirrors, allowing you to step through each light-bounce on the mirrors.

Light bounces in a pentagonal kaleidoscope, with the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc. bounces of light. Tip: Click & drag on the image to show how light rays bounce in the scope.
(Open in new window)

For the pentagon the kaleidoscope effect is quite different from the tessellating triangles we saw earlier.

In the first bounce, the mirrors will reflect the image at varying angles of 72°. In the second and third bounce, the overall shape starts to get stranger and jagged.

We can extend the image further, with an increasing number of light bounces. As we move further away from the centre, the more “chopped” the reflections becomes.

Zoomed out, the reflections become fragmented. Tip: Click & drag on the image to show how light rays bounce in the scope.
(Open in new window, or view as an image)

So pentagons don’t “work”. But we shouldn’t be surprised, because pentagons don’t tessellate easily anyway.

Let’s instead try 6 mirrors in the shape of a hexagon which does tessellate!

Light bounces in a hexagonal kaleidoscope, with the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc. bounces of light. Tip: Click & drag on the image to show how light rays bounce in the scope. (Open in new window)

While the hexagon tessellation does start okay on the first bounce, the images don’t “join” together seamlessly; There are borders where red is next to green. By the second bounce everything begins to unravel. I wish I had an intuitive explanation for why, but alas I don’t. The graphic is interactive, so you can trace the path of the light-ray for yourself, which may help with understanding the problem more intuitively.

Extending the image further out reveals the same choppy behaviour that the pentagon had. Nevertheless, there are some interesting patterns within the chaos, but I’m not sure why they happen. Someone could write a short paper on this subject!

The visual effects of a 6-sided kaleidoscope are similar to a 5-sided kaleidoscope. Tip: Click & drag on the image to show how light rays bounce in the scope.
(Open in new window, or view as an image)

One might think that the chopped imagery would detract from the kaleidoscopic effect, but I personally don’t see a huge issue when using a real reference image. Below are some examples of unconventional kaleidoscopes, with visually interesting results!

Examples of unconventional kaleidoscopes using 5, 6, or 7 mirrors.

Conclusion

Before writing this post, I regarded the kaleidoscope as a simple toy, but was surprised to find the nuance and complexity. I’m wowed by the stuff in the kaleidoscope gallery compiled by the Brewster Kaleidoscope Society, which features multidisciplinary crafts including jewellery, woodwork, metallurgy, mathematics, and design.

There’s so much more to explore with kaleidoscopes, especially digital ones. My kaleidoscope, that I shared at the beginning of this post, provides a simple user-interface for creating kaleidoscopic images. I had to stop myself from adding more controls making it more complex, but I know there’s many things to play around with. I’d like to see unconventional shapes like the ones I discussed earlier being used in real physical kaleidoscopes. But the imagination could go even wilder with digital ones, including colour transformations, video-feed delays, hyperbolic geometry,⁠^[6] virtual-reality headsets, or even some form of audio synthesis!

There are also interesting connections to be made between kaleidoscopes and infinity mirrors like the ones by Yayoi Kusama, or in Adam Savage’s One Day Builds: Rhombic Dodecahedron with Matt Parker!. There’s much to explore on the Wikipedia page for honeycomb geometry related to this.

But this post has gone on long enough. So I leave you with this final image, an image of a cat, trapped in a kaleidoscope.

A cat meowing in a semi-equilateral kaleidoscope.
Photo by an unknown author.⁠^[7]

Update 2025-02-21: To help explain why mirrors reflect light in certain ways, I’ve replaced the “light bounce” graphics with an interactive graphic which allows you to tap anywhere in the image and see how light bounces in the mirrors. The code for this interactive graphic can be found on GitHub. To see the old graphics, here are links to the triangle, pentagon, and hexagon graphics.

Footnotes

^ Pun intended.
^ There is misinformation online saying that the ball lens is not required in teleidoscopes. The Wikipedia page on teleidoscopes (Snapshot from December 2024) claims: "The lens at the end of the tube is not an optical requirement, but protects the internals of the teleidoscope." This is incorrect. The ball lens is there to focus the image. Without the lens, the more distant the object from the scope is, the more displaced the reflections are. See the appendix 'Ball lenses in teleidoscopes' for a visual demonstration. The error was added to the Wikipedia article in October 2006 from an anonymous editor, so it'll be difficult to correct.
^ If you wish to purchase one of these teleidoscopes, checkout the appendix 'Review of the two teleidoscopes'. They are quite cheap, so I wouldn't recommend them for anything other than a simple toy.
^ I did find one artist, by the name of Suraiya Begum, who in 2020 tried to create a teleidoscope using a pentagon mirror arrangement. Her experiments were somewhat unsuccessful though as the mirrors were blurry and didn't have decent reflection. I think she was also unaware that a ball lens is required.
^ I'm not sure why my code doesn't work on iOS and Android. Probably some GPU or memory issue. Feel free to submit a bug fix on GitHub if you figure it out!
^ Update 2025-01-12: Peter Stampfli appears to have created a hyperbolic kaleidoscope and has even written a paper on it in 2018: ‘Kaleidoscopes for Non-Euclidean Space’. He's even created a website to create hyperbolic kaleidoscopes. It would be cool if a webcam was added as an input source, and was made to work on mobile, but it's great to see someone has thought through the problem. Peter has a Mastodon profile where you can follow his newer work.
^ I originally found this image on Mastodon. Using reverse-image search tools like TinEye suggests the image was uploaded around 2010, but it was posted on random forums with zero attribution. So apologies unknown author for using your photo, but it's a perfect example of a kaleidoscope!

Appendix

Pictures referenced in this post

A Still-life with Fruit and Lobster (1650) by Jan Davidsz. de Heem.
From the National Galleries of Scotland, Photography by Antonia Reeve, licensed under Creative Commons CC BY-NC.‡

Pink Roses, Chinese Vase (1916-1920) by Samuel John Peploe.
From the National Galleries of Scotland, Photography by Antonia Reeve, licensed under Creative Commons CC BY-NC.‡

Mont Alba (1924-1927) by Charles Rennie Mackintosh.
From the National Galleries of Scotland, licensed under Creative Commons CC BY-NC.‡

The Hunt (c. 1926) by Robert Burns.
From the National Galleries of Scotland, licensed under Creative Commons CC BY-NC.‡

Folk Dance (1932) by Cyril Power.
From the National Galleries of Scotland, licensed under Creative Commons CC BY-NC.‡

Flowers in a Vase (1936) by Alexej von Jawlensky.
From the National Galleries of Scotland, licensed under Creative Commons CC BY-NC.‡

The Creation of Adam (c. 1511) by Michelangelo.
From the Wikimedia Commons, and is in the public domain.

The School of Athens (c. 1511) by Raphael.
From the Wikimedia Commons, and is in the public domain.

Lady with an Ermine (c. 1490) by Leonardo da Vinci.
From the Wikimedia Commons, and is in the public domain.

Girl with a Pearl Earring (c. 1665) by Johannes Vermeer.
From the Wikimedia Commons, and is in the public domain.

Memory of the Garden at Etten (Ladies of Arles) (1888) by Vincent van Gogh.
From the Wikimedia Commons, and is in the public domain.

Frühling im Bergell (1912) by Giovanni Giacometti.
From the Wikimedia Commons, and is in the public domain.

Bruce of Kinnaird Ancient Tartan Lambswool Blanket from Lochcarron of Scotland.

‡ While writing this post, sometime between the 10th and 15th of December, 2024, the National Galleries of Scotland "changed" the licensing terms for using the images on their website to be a "personal-use license agreement". Prior to this date, all the images attributed to the National Galleries of Scotland on this page were licensed on their website as "Creative Commons CC by NC". The Creative Commons licenses are irrevocable, so the old license applies.

Ball lenses in teleidoscopes

As stated in the footnote section above, the Wikipedia article on teleidoscopes (In December 2024) incorrectly states that "The lens at the end of the tube is not an optical requirement". The following images demonstrate that this is not the case, and that a ball lens is required to create a kaleidoscope image.

A glass ball is positioned in front of a three-sided kaleidoscope. In the distance, a 10cm by 10cm painting is shown. The glass ball is 3cm in diameter. The painting is 10cm away from the kaleidoscope itself. The kaleidoscope prism is 20cm long. A kaleidoscopic image can be seen in the kaleidoscope.

When looking in the kaleidoscope, we see the typical kaleidoscopic image. There are slight distortions at the edges of the image because the lens doesn't perfectly refract light into the kaleidoscope at similar angles. Also note, that the ball lens will cause the image to flip vertically and horizontally, meaning the image appears upside down. This is normal in all teleidoscopes.

The exact same setup as before, but without the ball lens. This time, the image inside the tube does not have a kaleidoscopic image.

When looking into the kaleidoscope without the ball lens, the kaleidoscopic image is not reproduced. Instead the image is reflected at weird angles. It's a cool effect, but it's not a kaleidoscope.

Review of the two teleidoscopes

I bought two teleidoscopes:

The larger teleidoscope is a Marble Kaleidoscope MKB from Schylling.
The smaller teleidoscope is a ColorScope - #1002 from Cottage Mills.

My recommendation: If you are looking for a toy, the Schylling model is more fun to use. For something more accurate, I don't recommend any of these models.

Both teleidoscopes have weird reflection issues which are difficult to describe but hopefully are noticable in the photos below. I'm unsure if it's just a poorly constructed scope (They are quite cheap!), or if it's an issue with how light is focused into the teleidoscope.

The following photos are from the same camera, using the same zoom.

The Schylling teleidoscope. The larger lens appears to result in distorted images the further away from the center the image is.

The Cottage Mills teleidoscope. The images are repeated a lot more, but the eye-piece is a lot smaller. The mirrors also appear misaligned and the regular patterns appear to diverge resulting in poorly reflected images. But, unlike the larger Schylling teleidoscope, the images are less distorted.

The Cyclorama: Virtual Reality in the 1800s

2024-06-09T00:00:00+00:00

In early 2024 Apple Inc. entered the virtual reality headset market, releasing the Apple Vision Pro. In their marketing footage for the new headset Apple demonstrates one of its many features, viewing panoramas captured from an iPhone.

Panoramas shot on an iPhone can be viewed through the Apple Vision Pro.
Copyright Apple Inc., licensed for non-commercial editorial use only.⁠^[1]

From the footage, it’s clear to me that Apple has put some thought to the spacial experience of panoramas. It’s subtle, but notice that as the person walks towards the panorama, more of the image is revealed on the edges. If it were a standard image projected on a flat surface, this effect would not happen. How exactly this functionality works is difficult to describe – it’s some form of parallax – but it certainly makes the depth perception feel more real.

But this post isn’t about fancy technology.

No, humanity used to have something better than a screen strapped to your face! We had true virtual reality – The cyclorama!

Invention of the Cyclorama

Cycloramas are large circular rooms that exhibit massive panoramic images on the walls. Viewers stand on a platform in the center of the room, immersing themselves into the 360-degree image, as if they were in the middle of the scene.

Back in the 1800s, these venues were simply called panoramas, but these days the meaning has broadened to be any wide landscape image.⁠^[2] To avoid any confusion, in this post I’ll refer to the venues as “cycloramas”, and the imagery as “panoramas”.

Cycloramas were invented by Robert Barker (1739-1806), an Irish portrait painter.

The story goes that Barker was walking with his daughter on Calton Hill, overlooking the city of Edinburgh. He speculated that one could frame a scene on one spot, turn, then paint another frame on the same spot, continuously, until a 360-degree scene was captured. By standing in the center of all the paintings joined together, you would then experience the illusion of being on Calton Hill!⁠^[3]

Panorama of Edinburgh from Calton Hill (2024)
By Leif Gehrmann, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

Barker took out a patent in 1787 and got to work.⁠^[4] He got help from his son Henry Aston Barker, only 12 years old, to sketch from the top of the City Observatory on Calton Hill.

The following year he exhibited his completed panorama at Archers’ Hall in Edinburgh. The cyclorama was very cramped. It was 7 meters in diameter and 2 meters high, and only six people could stand in the center.⁠^[5] This was not ideal, as the small size did not make the illusion appear convincing.

But despite these limitations, and with encouragement from his friends, Barker moved to London to make his true vision a reality.⁠^[6]

Leicester Square Panorama

After setting up 2 temporary venues in London, Barker settled near Leicester Square in 1793 to construct his grand panorama.⁠^[7] ⁠^[8]

A cross-section of the building can be seen below, along with an explanation.

A cross section view of the Leicester Square rotunda, showing the large and small panoramas.
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, from The British Museum.

Explanation of Plate 14 of The Rotunda.⁠^[9]

Loby of entrance.

Stairs to lower stage.

Stage from which is viewed the lower picture, or Panorama, of 85 feet diameter.

Passage to stair-case.

Stair-case to the upper picture, or Panorama, which ascends to a height that prevents the cutting the upper part of the under picture.

Stair where the company descend to prevent the improperly cutting the upper picture.

Stairs to ascend to the stage, and from which the spectator obtains the proper view of the upper picture of 50 feet diameter.

The column in the centre of the Rotunda.

Roof.

Sky-light of the under picture.

Sky-light of the upper picture.

Section of the walls of the building.

A gallery which encircles the Rotunda, and from which the pictures are fixed.

The building contained two cycloramas, a large panorama at the bottom, and a smaller panorama at the top. This allowed the building to stay open even when one panorama was being replaced with a new one. Viewers entered the cyclorama through a set of stairs on the edge of the stage. From above, sky-lights lit up both panoramas; This did mean the walkway to the upper panorama did cast a shadow onto the lower panorama which artists had to compensate for.⁠^[10] What’s not clear is how the cycloramas used “false terrain”, elements in the foreground, such as the sea in naval battles, or vegetation in scenes on land.⁠^[11] It’s possible that no complex terrain was used, because Barker thought “the idea of employing other gadgets besides the “pencil” (paintbrush) to create a realistic image of nature was unfair or cheating”.⁠^[12]

Despite the various technical challenges, it was a success.

Financially, the panorama made Barker a wealthy man.⁠^[13] It was visited by the royal family, including King George Ⅲ and Queen Charlotte, who “expressed the highest approbation of this singular production of genius and art”.⁠^[14] ⁠^[15] Vice-Admiral Lord Nelson, who was involved in a battle depicted in one of the panoramas, described it as “the most correct picture of any event I have ever seen”.⁠^[16] The illusion was so successful that one panorama depicting a capsized boat fooled a Newfoundland dog to spring over the hand-rail to rescue the men from drowning.⁠^[17] But the panorama didn’t come without criticism; English poet William Wordsworth called it a delusive spectacle, an ape-like mimicry, and in general was not happy with the audience for having a “degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation”.⁠^[18] – An amusing contrast to our modern usage of mobile-phones, video-games, and virtual-reality headsets.

Robert Barker died in 1806, putting the cyclorama in the hands of his son, Henry Aston Barker.⁠^[19] In 1826⁠^[20] it was bought out by Henry’s assistant John Burford, who then died in 1827 and was passed onto Robert Burford. Robert Burford continued creating panoramas, despite the decreasing popularity of the medium in the 1830s, right up until his death in 1861. In 1865 the building was auctioned off. Today it’s a church called Notre Dame de France.⁠^[21]

Recreating the Cyclorama

It‘s a bit difficult to imagine what these cycloramas looked like from within. There‘s an abundance of software to view panoramic images from a fixed center-point, but I was unable to find software that simulates the experience being inside a cyclorama. In other words, software that allows you to walk around on a circular platform surrounded by a panoramic image. It‘s possible someone has done this before, but there isn‘t a publicly available demo.

So I created my own virtual cyclorama.

First, I took the dimensions of Barker‘s Leicester Square Panorama, and recreated a 3D scene. I’m not great at 3D modelling, so it’s nothing fancy. Then, I had to find the panorama images to display. Unfortunately, none of the original panoramas from the Barkers were preserved, but fortunately we do have records in the form of small aquatint and watercolour paintings! Finally, I added controls to move around the scene to view the panorama from different perspectives. The joystick is used to move, and click-and-drag to change the perspective.

A screenshot of the virtual cyclorama I built.

The virtual cycloramas can be viewed by selecting the three thumbnails below.

	Edinburgh →
	London →
	Constantinople →

Even with my simulation, it’s difficult to tell how effective the illusion in the cyclorama was back then.

Since we don’t have the real panoramas, it’s probably not surprising that the scene looks unnatural, cartoony, and flat. The edges of the segmented panels in the London and Constantinople panoramas also don’t help with illusion.

I also developed this simulation to work in the browser without any requiring any peripheral devices. Perhaps the experience would be more immersive when implemented for a Virtual-Reality headset; Something that I’m not interested in, but maybe someone else would be inspired to create!

My simulation has other limitations. I didn’t use any fancy lighting effects (it’s just globally illuminated), which is why the stage looks flat. I also used illustrations of audience members, rather than 3D models of people (In case it’s not obvious, you can see these characters when walking around the stage). And, finally, because we don’t know what the “false terrain” in the foreground was, my simulation uses a simple dark surface; The real cyclorama probably would have something more practical to help with the illusion of depth and perspective.

But I hope these shortcomings don’t take away from the impressive detail in the panoramas. While the illusion of being in the scenery isn’t effective, being able to walk around and spot landmarks is fun!

Other Panoramas by the Barkers

Sadly, the three panoramas I listed are the only records from the Barkers which have detailed illustrations. Dozens of other panoramas exhibited at Leicester Square did not get the same treatment.

Thankfully, we have records of panoramas in the form of souvenir items: Panorama Keys.

Four 'Panorama Keys' for some of the exhibitions: View of Windsor, Lord Bridport's Engagement, Edinburgh and the Surrounding Country, View of Flushing During the Siege.
Respectively: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 Digital Bodleian, CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 Digital Bodleian, Public Domain Yale Center for British Art, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 The British Museum.

These panorama keys could be purchased while visiting the cyclorama, and gave detail to what the audience were seeing. This included names of landmarks and people, and sometimes historical context. The circular designs, shown above, place the viewer in center the of the key allowing the viewer to engage with the scene by rotating the paper. Later designs sadly ditched the circular aesthetic, and instead used simple rectangular panoramas, a format that we’re more familiar with today when we take a picture on our phones.⁠^[22]

The keys aren’t anything like the original panoramas; They’re missing detail, colour, and shading.

But for my purposes of recreating the panoramas, they are a handy substitute!

I wrote some software to convert these circular designs into viewable panoramas, like the recreations I made for Edinburgh, London, and Constantinople.

Interested in naval battle scenes? Here’s the Battle of Copenhagen in 1801, where the British were scared that the Danish were in a League of Armed Neutrality (which the British considered pro-French), so they attacked Denmark.
Remember that time Napoleon was exiled in 1814? Enjoy this view of Elba and Portoferraio where you can watch Napoleon being dropped off.
How about something more action packed? Join the frontline of the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, the battle that marked the end of the Napoleonic Wars.
Want to witness Queen Victoria arriving in France on a royal visit to Louis Philippe I in 1843? Enjoy the scene of Le Tréport, a port town in the north of France, with an excited crowd greeting the royals.
History not your cup of tea? Checkout Pandemonium, the capital of Hell in John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost. It features dragons, Beelzebub, and Satan!

Naturally, with these crude representations of the panoramas, you’ll need a vivid imagination to guess what the real panoramas looked like. Imagine detailed uniforms, colourful explosions, moody atmospheres, and picturesque hills. Exotic scenes designed to trick you into believing you were there, without needing to leave the metropolitan comforts of London.

The Leicester Square Panorama was impressive. But can it get even more impressive? How about an even bigger panorama? Let me introduce you to Thomas Hornor…

Thomas Hornor’s Colosseum

In 1820, St. Paul’s Cathedral in London was under renovations and scaffolding was erected over the dome.⁠^[23] This allowed Thomas Hornor, a surveyor and draftsman, to have access to a unique perspective over London. Originally he was thinking of publishing some small prints with views of the city, hoping to make a small profit from tourists. But the views inspired him to make something even greater – The Colosseum.⁠^[24]

Graphic illustrations of the Colosseum.
By J. M. Gandy, F. Mackenzie, et al., Published 1829 by Ackermann and Co.
Public Domain, from Yale Center for British Art.

Design for the Colosseum, Regent's Park
By Decimus Burton (and Thomas Hornor), circa 1823.⁠^[25]
Licensed for non-commercial use only, from the Victoria and Albert Museum.

The Colosseum started construction in 1824, and took under two years to build. The building was circular, topped with a domed roof with glass skylights, fronted with a Grecian-Doric portico resembling the Parthenon. Inside was a tower, with spiral staircases reaching a platform to view the panorama of London. The tower also featured a steam-powered elevator, at the time called an “Ascending Room”, one of the first passenger elevators in the world!⁠^[26] ⁠^[27]

No remnants of the panorama exist today.

Fortunately, we do have a panorama key of the panorama based on Hornor’s sketches, printed by Godefroy Engelmann I.

Personally I wasn’t satisfied with just having a key. I looked around for more panoramas and discovered that a couple of years later, someone by the name of Josiah Henshall created a similar looking panorama from the exact same place, this time in a photorealistic format. This hopefully gives a better impression of what Hornor’s panorama would’ve looked like.⁠^[28]

Finally, I wanted to see a contemporary view, and David Iliff was generous to license his panorama in the Creative Commons, which I could use to create a modern cyclorama!

I’ve compiled all three versions as virtual cycloramas below.

	Panorama Key by Engelmann, 1829 →
	Prints by Henshall, 1836 →
	Photograph by David Iliff, 2007 →

Some notable qualities of the Colosseum:

The Colosseum was roughly 40 meters in diameter, compared to Barker’s Panorama of 25 meters. This size increase is significant; The larger the diameter, the better the illusion. When walking around the platforms of smaller cycloramas, people are more likely to be disoriented and stumble, as the walls of the panorama would shift more than one would expect. In contrast, larger cycloramas allowed for greater depth perception. Most cycloramas at the time were 30 meters in diameter, so the Colosseum was one of the largest.⁠^[29]

The panorama itself was met with mixed reception. It was highly praised for its detail, but Hornor made it his obsession. He was a primarily a surveyor, focused on accuracy and disregarded London’s hazy skies. One critic wrote, “In point of likeness and deception nothing can be more complete; but as a picture, its very exactitude and truth are its greatest impediments, and it is of course deficient in that effect which can only be attained by a more scientific disposition of light and shade.”⁠^[30] As one art historian put it, “what Hornor offers in his panorama is no longer a reflection of reality but the hyperreality of a mail-order catalog.”⁠^[31] In other words, technically detailed but artistically lacking.

Regardless, the panorama was complete and drew in crowds.

Hornor himself did not profit from the endeavour, as he had fled to the United States shortly before the Colosseum was opened to the public. Incomplete side-attractions like exhibitions and greenhouses resulted in financial instability. Funding from a key investor disappeared and the venture went bankrupt in 1829.⁠^[32] ⁠^[33]

The Colosseum, Regent's Park Outer Circle. By Roger Fenton, circa 1860.
Licensed for non-commercial use only, from the Victoria and Albert Museum.

The Colosseum went through various owners, constantly being refurbished and repainted. Eventually it was successful, becoming a popular destination for high society. In 1845, a new panorama was created, called “London by Night”, which was hoisted in front of the old panorama during certain times of day. Later in 1848, “Paris by Night” was also added.⁠^[34] ⁠^[35] But by the 1850s, strong competition from venues like the Crystal Palace made it difficult to retain the crowds. The building was demolished in 1875. The panoramas themselves wound up in Philadelphia, but ultimately were lost in the 1880s.⁠^[36]

Hornor’s Colosseum remained one of the largest cycloramas, up until the 21st century.⁠^[37]

Giovanni Segantini’s Panorama

While the popularity of the cycloramas and panoramas waned in the middle of the 1800s, by the end of the century there was revived interest in continental Europe.⁠^[38]

One man hoped to go one step further and reinvent the cyclorama.

Giovanni Segantini was an artist with an ambitious dream to create his own panorama. Segantini is known for his landscape paintings of the alpine scenery, like the one shown below, Spring in the Alps.

Spring in the Alps, by Giovanni Segantini, created in 1897.
Public Domain, from Getty Museum.

Segantini’s dream was to create a massive panorama of his home region, the valley of Engadin in Switzerland. A cyclorama would be built for the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris. To get the project started, he appealed to as many people as he could, eventually finding support from a group of hotel owners.

In the book, The Panorama: History of a mass medium, Stephan Oettermann writes,

From about 1896 on, Segantini invested all his considerable energy and enthusiasm in promoting this project, which over the years had become almost an obsession with him. He called press conferences, created committees, founded clubs, and delivered lectures. He also wrote a “proclamation” explaining his idea and sent it to magazines and newspapers.

This finally convinced a group of hotel owners in the Engadin that Segantini’s panorama might increase tourism to the region, and he talked them into giving him a large enough advance for him to be able to start work on it.⁠^[39]

Sketch of the Pavilion for the Engadin Panorama, by Giovanni Segantini, created in 1897.
Public Domain, from Die Kunst für alle.⁠^[40] Alternative available at Galleria Civica G. Segantini.⁠^[41]

Below are excerpts from Segantini’s proclamation, originally in vibrant German prose,⁠^[42]

Dear gentlemen of Engadin!

The project that I am reading to you, dear gentlemen of the Engadin, sons of these Alps, is bold but clear, like the sunlight that illuminates these mountains of ours. […] I thought that all the beauties that surround us should find their worthy place in this tremendous exhibition, and I conceived the project which is the purpose of our gathering and which, when realized, will be the highest distinction among the best of this future world exhibition.

As you already know, it is a huge panorama that represents the most magnificent and outstanding points of our Upper Engadin and is intended to be an artistic summary of them. This panorama will have nothing to do with the others that have been seen so far. […]

Science will come to the aid of art to achieve the desired effect; we will have electric fans to produce freshness,⁠^[43] various calculated disarrays of light and shade, hydraulic arrangements and acoustic works, and everything that can best serve to make the visitor’s imagination most complete and vivid, as if he were really there on our mountains.

The panorama painted in the background will have a circumference of 220 meters and a height of 20 meters, with a surface of 4400 square meters. […]

The interior will cover a surface of 3850 square meters and in the center will accommodate a mountain hill 75 meters in circumference and 16 meters high, with two streets, an ascent and a descent, laid out in inclined semicircles, each of which covers half of the panorama which can be completely overlooked from the upper platform. […]

The entire building, made of iron, would take up a total area of 3850 square meters and would be 25 meters high with a facade about 40 meters long and 30 meters high, on which I would depict all the villages of the Upper Engadin in symbolic images.

But eventually the hotel owners decided that Engadin didn’t need that much publicity, so they withdrew their financial support. Stephan Oettermann concludes, “this spelled the end for a project that would have resulted in the most ambitious panorama of all time, in quality as well as sheer size. It was also the death knell of the age of panoramas”.⁠^[44]

Segantini scaled down the project to a triptych, depicting three landscapes, Life, Nature, and Death. He died of peritonitis in 1899, only 41 years old, in a mountain hut while working on the triptych.⁠^[45]

Triptych of Life, Nature, and Death, by Giovanni Segantini, created 1898-1899.
Public Domain, from Wikimedia Commons.

From what I could find, there are no illustrations of what the interior of the building would look like.⁠^[46] I tried to visualise what Segantini described in his proclamation, but I don’t understand how he’d layout the hill and streets. So unlike the previous cycloramas, I’m not able to provide a simulation of the experience.

At the very least, below is a photograph of Upper Engadin, to give you a feel of the location. You can understand how such a view would compel him to create an ambitious panorama.

Panorama of Upper Engadin (2017)
By Lino Schmid, CC BY-SA 4.0, from Wikimedia Commons.

While we don’t have clear interior descriptions, I think it would be helpful to show how large his vision was compared to the last two cycloramas. Below is a diagram, demonstrating the scale of Segantini’s Panorama compared to his predecessors.

A scale diagram of the three cycloramas discussed in this post.

Cycloramas Today

All the cycloramas I’ve discussed in this post are from the distant past, but there are plenty of modern cycloramas that can be visited today!

Notable cycloramas are:

Thun-Panorama – The oldest surviving cyclorama, created in 1814 and located in Switzerland. (⌀12m × 7m)⁠^[47]
Panorama Mesdag – The oldest surviving panorama still in its original location, created in 1881 and located at the Hague. (⌀36m × 14m)⁠^[48]
Splendid Central Plains / The Land of Charm and Beauty / At the South of (yellow) River – Created in 2010 and located in China, it is possibly the largest cyclorama. (⌀52m × 18m)⁠^[49]

There is also an organisation called the International Panorama Council, dedicated to supporting research and communication of historic and modern panoramas. They have a database of Panoramas which you can filter by country.

Yadegar Asisi is known for more modern takes on the panorama, including Titanic, The Wall (Berlin), and The Cathedral of Monet. (⌀30m × 32m)⁠^[50]

From the marketing material I’ve seen, it doesn’t look like Asisi is concerned about the illusion of the panorama; Visitors are allowed to walk around and get up close to the walls. I believe this can be attributed to a change in audience expectations. The modern audience is accustomed to visual illusions like cinemas, computer screens, and more recently, virtual reality headsets. So they probably won’t mind if the illusion breaks down from certain perspectives, both because the audience knows how the trick works, and because they want to see it break, for fun!

Therefore, immersion is more important than illusion. The experience of being inside the cyclorama and viewing the themes presented on the panoramas is what brings the audience joy, not the illusion. This distinction is important, not just for cycloramas, but for emerging media technology like virtual-reality headsets.

Closing Remarks

Thanks for reading this lengthy post! My original plan was to just remark upon Barker’s story, but I found Hornor’s and Segantini’s stories too interesting not to share.

If you want to see more examples of simulated cycloramas exhibited at Leicester Square and other places, check out cyclorama.leifgehrmann.com.

The source code for the cyclorama app can be found on GitHub. I also made a scrappy script (also on GitHub) to convert those circular panorama keys into horizontal panoramas, which I used heavily for this project.

Want a list of all panoramas by Barker & co.? Checkout the appendix below List of Barker Panoramas for the longest list of panoramas, including links and references to archives which have copies of the leftover artifacts. It’s by no means complete, but I think it’s the largest compilation that exists on the internet at the moment, so… you’re welcome. 😄

For books, I recommend The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium, by Stephan Oettermann, which has a more complete history of panoramas. For even deeper analysis on Panoramas, I also highly recommend The First Panoramas: Visions of British Imperialism, by Denise Blake Oleksijczuk. The latter examines not just the history of the early panoramas, but also the nuances of Jacobite history, gender, imperialism, and human perception.

Citations & Footnotes

^ Introducing Apple Vision Pro …, “Memories come alive”
^ The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium, p. 7
^ The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium, p. 358
^ Panoramania, p. 57
^ The First Panoramas: Visions of British Imperialism, p. 28-29
^ The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium, p. 101
^ The First Panoramas: Visions of British Imperialism, p. 50
^ The precise location of the building can be found here.
^ Plans, and views in perspective, with descriptions, …, p. 8
^ The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium, p. 103
^ The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium, p. 105
^ The First Panoramas: Visions of British Imperialism, p. 54
^ The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium, p. 108
^ The First Panoramas: Visions of British Imperialism, p. 69
^ ‘Spectacles within doors’, p. 141
^ The First Panoramas: Visions of British Imperialism, p. 153-154
^ ‘Spectacles within doors’, p. 142
^ ‘Spectacles within doors’, p. 145
^ The panorama: with memoirs of its inventor …, p. 9
^ It's not entirely clear to me if it was 1823 or 1826. In The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium, Stephan Oettermann says on p. 111 “The last panorama Henry Barker drew himself was The Coronation of George IV in 1822. The following year he sold the Leicester Square Panorama and his shares in the Strand Panorama to his partner John Burford and Burford's son Robert.”, but on p. 113 “In 1826 Burford bought out Henry Barker completely and operated both panoramas until his death later that year.”.
^ The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium, p. 113
^ The First Panoramas: Visions of British Imperialism, p. 130, 169
^ The Regent’s Park Colosseum …, p. 13
^ The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium, p. 132
^ Panoramania, p. 87
^ Curiosities of London, p. 280-281
^ The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium, p. 134-135
^ There is one other illustration of the panorama, believed to be from 1845, but a high quality scan is not available to the public. As of June 2024, it is framed in the staff room of the London Metropolitan Archives. A record exists in the Guildhall Library with the title A view of London and the surrounding country taken from the top of Saint Paul's Cathedral and has the item barcode 375229-1001. You can see a picture of it on Flickr. A low-resolution black and white scan is also available in the book The Regent's Park colosseum : or, 'Without hyperbole, the wonder of the world' : being an account of a forgotten pleasure dome and its creators By Ralph Hyde.
^ The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium, p. 59, 135
^ Tour of a German artist in England, p. 275; Kunstreise durch England und Belgien, p. 127
^ The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium, p. 137
^ The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium, p. 138
^ Panoramania, p. 82
^ The Colosseum and its Attractions …, p. 8
^ The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium, p. 138-140
^ Panoramania, p. 83-85
^ I'm not 100% sure about this claim, but I couldn't find any other 360 degree cycloramas exceeding a diameter of 39 meters before the 2000s. On page 21 of The Regent’s Park Colosseum …, Ralph Hyde wrote “This would be effect the largest oil painting the world had ever seen”, which asserts this fact, but only for oil-based paintings. French painter Jean-Charles Langois created a similarly sized panorama in 1839 (Architected by Jacques Ignace Hittorff, located along Champs-Elysées in Paris, but demolished in 1855), a few years after Hornor's Colosseum, but I couldn't find any illustrations of the panoramas exhibited at the cyclorama. You can read more about Langlois in The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium in pages 158-164. A panorama with a diameter of 52 meters was opened in China in 2010, which is the new record.
^ The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium, p. 235
^ The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium, p. 181
^ Die Kunst für alle, p. 294
^ Galleria Civica G. Segantini, Progetto per il padiglione …
^ Segantini, p. 104-108
^ According to Stephan Oettermann on p. 181 of The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium, “Segantini had originally wanted gigantic ozone-producing machines, so that visitors to the exhibit in Paris could get a whiff of genuine high-altitude atmosphere”. I followed the citation Oettermann referenced (Die Kunst für alle, p. 297), but I couldn't find any thing that mentions it. Thankfully, I found an alternate source that confirms this on page 111 of Segantini, published by Marcel Montandon in 1906: “…; so träumte er von der herstellung kolossaler Maschinen zur Ozonfabrikation, um das Panorama so zu ventilieren, daß die Besucher in Paris die Höhenluft der Alpen einatmen könnten; …”.
^ The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium, p. 183
^ Geovanni Segantini: Light and Symbol, p. 118, 128
^ Curiously, shortly after Segantini's proposal was rejected, Giovanni Giacometti, a close friend and mentee of Segantini, created Panorama from Muottas Muragl in 1898 which depicts the exact same scene of Upper Engadin. There are no proper pictures of the panorama online, but a video of it can be found on YouTube thanks to Marc B. Bundi. Through Giacometti, we can perhaps have a vague idea for how Segantini might have envisioned his own panorama.
^ International Panorama Council, Thun-Panorama
^ International Panorama Council, Panorama Mesdag
^ Guinness World Records, Largest panoramic painting
^ Art in Berlin, Die Kathedrale von Monet

References

Introducing Apple Vision Pro: Apple’s first spatial computer – Apple Inc., published June 5, 2023.
The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium – Stephan Oettermann, published in 1997, available at the Internet Archive.
Panoramania! : The Art and Entertainment of the ‘all-embracing’ View – Ralph Hyde, published in 1988.
The First Panoramas: Visions of British Imperialism – Denise Blake Oleksijczuk, published in 2011.
Plans, and views in perspective, with descriptions, of buildings erected in England and Scotland : and also an essay, to elucidate the Grecian, Roman and Gothic architecture : accompanied with designs – Robert Mitchell, published in 1801, scanned by the Getty Research Institute, available at the Internet Archive.
‘Spectacles within doors’: Panoramas of London in the 1790s – Markman Ellis, Published in Romanticism 2008 14:2, pages 133-148, by the Edinburgh University Press.
The panorama: with memoirs of its inventor, Robert Barker, and his son, the late Henry Aston Barker – George Richard Corner, published in 1857.
The Regent’s Park colosseum : or, ‘Without hyperbole, the wonder of the world’ : being an account of a forgotten pleasure dome and its creators – Ralph Hyde, published by Ackermann in 1982. Only 200 copies of this book exist, one is publicly available at the National Library of Scotland.
Curiosities of London: Exhibiting the most rare and remarkable objects of interest in the metropolis; With nearly sixty years’ personal recollections. - John Timbs, published in 1868, available at the Internet Archive.
Tour of a German artist in England. with notices of private galleries, and remarks on the state of art – Johann David Passavant, originally published in 1833 under the title Kunstreise durch England und Belgien, republished in English in 1978, available at the Internet Archive.
Kunstreise durch England und Belgien, nebst einem Bericht über den Bau des Domthurms zu Frankfurt am Main – Johann David Passavant, published in 1833, available at the Internet Archive.
The Colosseum and its Attractions, Containing historical reminiscences of the London Colosseum, the origin and object of the New York Colosseum, and a description of and key to the great cyclorama of Paris By Night. – W. M. Lendrum, Published in 1874 by C. Richardson & Co., available at the Internet Archive.
Die Kunst für alle (15th Edition, 1899-1900) – Friedrich Pecht, published in 1900, available at Heidelberg Univeristy, DigiZeitschriften.de.
Progetto per il padiglione del “Panorama dell’Engadina” – Giovanni Segantini, published in 1897, available at Galleria Civica G. Segantini (segantiniearco.it).
Segantini – Marcel Montandon, published in 1906, published by Bielefeld und Leipzig Verlag von Velhagen & Klasing, available at the Internet Archive.
Giovanni Segantini: Light and Symbol - Annie-Paule Quinsac, published in 2000, available at the Internet Archive.
Thun-Panorama (Wocher-Panorama) – International Panorama Council.
Panorama Mesdag – International Panorama Council.
Largest panoramic painting – Guinness World Records, viewed April 13, 2024.
Die Kathedrale von Monet – Art in Berlin, published July 12, 2020.

Appendix and Transcripts

List of recommended archives

The list below is a collection of websites that featured one or more of the panoramas from the 18th century.

List of Barker Panoramas

The list below is a collection of all the panoramas I could find from Robert Barker, and additional panoramas that were exhibited at the Archers’ Hall in Edinburgh, 28 Haymarket in London, 28 Castle Street in London, Leicester Square in London, and 168/9 The Strand. The list will contain panoramas from other artists, such as Robert Burford.

1788 - View of Edinburgh and the Surrounding Country - Exhibited at the Archers’ Hall in Edinburgh in 1788, and later at 28 Haymarket in London in 1789.
- Aquatints (Black and White) - Capital Collections
- Aquatints (Black and White) - National Library of Scotland
- Aquatints (Coloured) - National Museums Scotland
- Watercolour - University of Edinburgh
- Watercolour - Google Arts and Culture
1791 - View of London from the roof of the Albion Mills - Exhibited at 28 Castle Street in London.
- Aquatints from 1792-1793 – Yale Center for British Art
- Panorama Key (English/French) - The British Museum
- Panorama Key (English/German/French) - Princeton University
1793 - View of the Grand Fleet at Spithead - Exhibited at Leicester Square, Large Circle.
- Panorama Key - Yale Center for British Art
- Panorama Key - British Museum
1794 - View of Bath and the Surrounding Country
- Panorama Key - See Page 128 in The First Panoramas: Visions of British Imperialism by Denise Oleksijczuk
1794 - View of London from the roof of the Albion Mills – The second version of the panorama, this time exhibited at Leicester Square, Upper circle.
1795 - Position of the British and French Fleets (Also known as "Lord Howe's victory over the French at Ushant on 1 June 1794")
- Panorama Key - British Museum
1795 - Admiral Cornwallis's Naval Engagement
- Panorama Key - Digital Bodleian – University of Oxford
1795 - Lord Bridport's Engagement
- Panorama Key - Archive.org
- Panorama Key - Digital Bodleian – University of Oxford
1796 - View of Brighthemstone (May also be known as "View of Brighton")
1797 - View of Plymouth from Mount Edgcumbe
- Panorama Key - University of Edinburgh Archives Online (Not digitised)
1798 - View of Windsor
- Panorama Key - Digital Bodleian – University of Oxford
1798 - View of Margate
1798 - Lord Nelson's Defeat of the French at the Nile
- Panorama Key - Archive.org
- Panorama Key - Yale Center for British Art
- Panorama Key - Digital Bodleian – University of Oxford
1799 - View of Ramsgate
1800 - View of Constantinople from the Tower of Galata
- Panorama Key (1st variant) - The British Museum
- Panorama Key (2nd variant) - See Page 92 in The First Panoramas: Visions of British Imperialism by Denise Oleksijczuk
- Aquatint (Black and white, high resolution) - Library of Congress
- Aquatint (Coloured, low resolution) - King George III's Personal Coloured Views Collection
1801 - View of Constantinople from the Tower of Leander
- Panorama Key - State Library of New South Wales
- Panorama Key - Victoria and Albert Museum
- Panorama Key - University of Edinburgh Archives Online (Not Digitised)
1802 - Lord Nelson's Attack of Copenhagen
- Panorama Key - See Page 152 in The First Panoramas: Visions of British Imperialism by Denise Oleksijczuk
- Panorama Key - Det Kgl. Bibliotek
- Panorama Key - State Library of New South Wales
- Panorama Key - University of Edinburgh Archives Online (Not Digitised)
1803 - View of Paris from Seine
- Panorama Key - Featured in The First Panoramas: Visions of British Imperialism by Denise Oleksijczuk
- Panorama Key (Low Resolution) - Media storehouse
1803 - View of Paris taken between the Pont Neuf and the Louvre
- Panorama Key - State Library of New South Wales
- Panorama Key - Yale Center for British Art (Not digitised)
- Preparatory study sketch - Victoria and Albert Museum
1805 - View of Edinburgh and the Surrounding Country
- Panorama Key - National Galleries Scotland
- Panorama Key - Capital Collections
- Panorama Key - Yale Center for British Art
1805 - View of Gibraltar and Bay, Taken from the Battery, called The Devil's Tongue.
- Panorama Key - Meisterdrucke
- Panorama Key - Media Storehouse
- Panorama Key - Flickr
- Panorama Key - See page 73 in Panoramania by Ralph Hyde
- Print - Art UK
- Print - University of Aberdeen
1805 - Battle of Trafalgar
- Panorama Key - Royal Museums Greenwich
- Panorama Key (Colour) - Wellcome Collection
- Panorama Key - University of Edinburgh Archives Online (Not Digitised)
1805 - View of the Bay of Naples (Strand)
- Panorama Key - The British Museum
1806 - View of Weymouth at Sunset
1806 - View of the Bay of Dublin
- Panorama Key - Dublin City Libraries (via Flickr)
1807 - Grand View of Paris (View of Paris) - It's essentially a reopening of "View of Paris taken between the Pont Neuf and the Louvre".
- Panorama Key - Meisterdrucke
- Panorama Key - Yale Center for British Art (Not digitised)
1807 - Interior of Dublin
- Panorama Key - Dublin City Libraries (via Flickr)
1807 - View of the Rock and Bay of Gibraltar
1808 - View of Grand Cairo
- Panorama Key - Media Storehouse
1810 - View of Flushing during the Siege
- Panorama Key - The British Museum
- Panorama Key - State Library of New South Wales
1810 - Grand View of La Valetta, Malta
- Panorama Key - The British Museum
1811 - View of Messina in Sicily
- Panorama Key - Bridgeman Images (Watermarked)
1811 - View of Lisbon
- Panorama Key - The British Museum
1812 - View of Grand Harbour at Malta
1812 - Badajoz and the Surrounding Country, Representing the Siege in 1812
- Panorama Key - The British Museum
1814 - View of Battle of Vittoria
- Panorama Key - The British Museum
- Panorama Key - Yale Center for British Art
1814 - Battle of Paris
- Panorama Key - University of Exeter
- Panorama Key - University of Sheffield (Not Digitised)
1814 - View of Paris (Strand)
- Panorama Key - The British Museum
- Description - OpenLibrary.org
1814 - View of Berlin (Strand)
- Panorama Key - The British Museum
- Description - National Library of Scotland (Not Digitised)
1814 - View of Island of Elba and Town of Porto-Ferrajo
- Panorama Key - Yale University Library
- Panorama Key - The British Museum
- Description - Archive.org
1815 - View of the City of Paris (Strand)
- Panorama Key - The British Museum
1816 - View of the Battle of Waterloo
- Panorama Key - The British Museum
- Description - Yale University Library
- Description - OpenLibrary.org
- Panorama Key - University of Edinburgh Archives Online (Partially Digitised)
1816 - View of the City of St. Petersburgh
- Panorama Key - Flickr
- Panorama Key - Instagram
- Panorama Key - Grosvenor Prints
- Panorama Key - Planetarian on Vol. 34, No. 2, page 7
1817 - View of Rome, taken from the tower of the capitol (Strand)
- Description - OpenLibrary.org
- Description - National Library of Scotland (Not Digitised)
1818 - Lord Exmouth's Attack upon Algiers
- Panorama Key - See Page 167 in The First Panoramas: Visions of British Imperialism by Denise Oleksijczuk
- Description - State Library of New South Wales
- Description - OpenLibrary.org
1818 - Dover, taken from the South Pier
- Panorama Key - University of Edinburgh Archives Online (Not Digitised)
1819 - View of the North Coast of Spitzbergen (Leicester Square)
- Panorama Key - See Page 171 in The First Panoramas: Visions of British Imperialism by Denise Oleksijczuk
- Description - OpenLibrary.org
- Description - National Library of Scotland (Not Digitised)
1819 - View of Lausanne and Lake of Geneva (Leicester Square, Upper Circle)
- Panorama Key - The British Museum
1819 - View of Venice (Strand)
- Description - OpenLibrary.org
- Description - National Library of Scotland (Not Digitised)
1820 - View of Naples, and the surrounding scenery (Strand)
- Description - National Library of Scotland (Not Digitised)
1821 - View of Bern and the high Alps and the surrounding country (Leicester Square, Lower Circle)
- Description - OpenLibrary.org
- Description - National Library of Scotland (Not Digitised)
1822 - Procession on the coronation of his majesty George IV: which took place on Thursday, July 19, 1821 (Leicester Square, Lower Circle)
- Panorama Key - University of Edinburgh Archives Online (Not Digitised)
- Description - National Library of Scotland (Not Digitised)
- Panorama Key (low resolution) - biblio.co.uk
- Related aquatint showing the coronation procession (non-360 panorama) - Yale Center for British Art
- Related aquatint showing the coronation procession - Library of Congress
- Related lithograph showing the coronation procession - Yale Center for British Art
1822 - Island and city of Corfu, with part of the coast of Greece, Epirus, and the Suliote chain of mountains, in the distance (Strand)
- Description - OpenLibrary.org
- Description - University of Edinburgh Archives Online (Not Digitised)
- Description - National Library of Scotland (Not Digitised)
1824 - A view of the ruins of the city of Pompeii, and surrounding country (Strand)
- Description - National Library of Scotland (Not Digitised)
- Description - State Library of New South Wales
1824 - A second view of the ruins of Pompeii, and surrounding country (Leicester Square)
- Description - National Library of Scotland (Not Digitised)
- Description - Archive.org
1825 - View of the city of Edinburgh, and surrounding country (Leicester Square)
- Panorama Key - Library of Congress
- Description - State Library of New South Wales
- Description - National Library of Scotland (Not Digitised)
1827 - View of the city of Madrid, and surrounding country (Leicester Square)
- Description - OpenLibrary.org
- Description - National Library of Scotland (Not Digitised)
1826 - View of the city of Mexico (Leicester Square)
- Panorama Key - Library of Congress
- Description - OpenLibrary.org
- Description - National Library of Scotland (Not Digitised)
1827 - View of the city and lake of Geneva and surrounding country (Strand)
- Description - State Library of New South Wales
- Description - National Library of Scotland (Not Digitised)
1828 - View of the battle of Navarin (Strand)
- Description - National Library of Scotland (Not Digitised)
1828 - View of the city of St. Sebastian, and the bay of Rio Janeiro (Leicester Square)
- Description - State Library of New South Wales
- Description - Archive.org
1828 - View of the city and bay of Genoa
- Description - National Library of Scotland (Not Digitised)
- Description - Archive.org
1828 - A view of the city of Paris, taken from the place Louis XVI (Strand)
- Description - National Library of Scotland (Not Digitised)
1829 - View of the town of Sydney, New South Wales; The harbour of Port Jackson, and the surrounding country
- Panorama Key - Trove - National Library of Australia
- Description - State Library of New South Wales
- Description - Archive.org
1829 - A view of the city of Constantinople, with its European and Asiatic suburbs (Strand)
- Description - State Library of New South Wales
- Description - National Library of Scotland (Not Digitised)
1829 - An attempt to illustrate Milton's Pandemonium (Leicester Square)
- Description - State Library of New South Wales
- Description - National Library of Scotland (Not Digitised)
1830 - View of the city of Quebec (Leicester Square)
- Description - State Library of New South Wales
- Description - OpenLibrary.org
1830 - View of the city of Calcutta (Leicester Square)
- Description - State Library of New South Wales
- Description - OpenLibrary.org
1830 - A view of the city and harbour of Amsterdam (Strand)
- Description - State Library of New South Wales
- Description - National Library of Scotland (Not Digitised)
1831 - A view of Hobart Town, Van Dieman's Land, and the surrounding country (Strand)
- Description - State Library of New South Wales
- Description - National Library of Scotland (Not Digitised)
1831 - A view of the island and harbour of Bombay (Leicester Square)
- Panorama Key - Yale Center for British Art
- Description - State Library of New South Wales
1831 - A view of the city of Florence, and the surrounding country (Leicester Square)
- Description - National Library of Scotland (Not Digitised)
1832 - A view of the city of Milan, and the surrounding country (Leicester Square)
- Description - State Library of New South Wales
- Description - National Library of Scotland (Not Digitised)
- Description - Archive.org
1832 - A view of the great temple of Karnak and the surrounding city of Thebes (Leicester Square)
- Description - National Library of Scotland (Not Digitised)
1832 - View of Stirling
- Panorama Key - University of Edinburgh Archives Online (Not Digitised)
1833 - View of the falls of Niagara
- Description - OpenLibrary.org
1833 - View of the siege of Antwerp (Leicester Square)
- Panorama Key - Library of Congress
- Description - National Library of Scotland (Not Digitised)
1834 - View of New York
- Panorama Key - Library of Congress
- Panorama Key - Archive.org
- Panorama Key (Colour) - New York Public Library
1834 - View of the continent of Boothia, discovered by Captain Ross, in his late expedition to the polar regions (Leicester Square)
- Panorama Key - Yale University Library
- Description - OpenLibrary.org
- Description - National Library of Scotland (Not Digitised)
1834 - A view of the cemetery of Père la Chaise, including a distant view of Paris and the surrounding country (Leicester Square)
- Description - Archive.org
1835 - A view of the city of Jerusalem, and the surrounding country (Leicester Square)
- Description - National Library of Scotland (Not Digitised)
1836 - A view of the city of Lima, and the surrounding country
- Description - Archive.org
1837 - View of the city and bay of Dublin, with a great portion of the county of Dublin
- Description - OpenLibrary.org
1837 - A view of Mont Blanc, the valley of Chamounix, and the surrounding mountains
- Description - Archive.org
1838- View of Canton, the river Tigress, and surrounding country
- Description - OpenLibrary.org
1838(?) - View of the Bay of Islands, New Zealand
- Panorama Key - The British Museum
- Panorama Key - Trove - National Library of Australia
1839 - View of the grand harbour of Malta, and the city of La Valetta
- Description - Archive.org
1839 - View of the Interior of the Coliseum, and part of the ancient city of Rome (Leicester Square)
- Panorama Key - Yale University Library
- Description - National Library of Scotland (Not Digitised)
1839 - A view of Rome, Ancient and modern; with the surrounding country taken from the tower of the capitol (Leicester Square)
- Description - OpenLibrary.org
- Description - National Library of Scotland (Not Digitised)
1839 - A view of the palace and gardens of Versailles, on the Fete St. Louis, August 25th, 1839 (Leicester Square)
- Description - National Library of Scotland (Not Digitised)
- Description - Archive.org
1840 - View of Macao in China
- Description - OpenLibrary.org
1841 - A View of the city of Jerusalem, and the surrounding country (Leicester Square)
- Description - National Library of Scotland (Not Digitised)
1841 - A view of the city of Damascus, and the surrounding country (Leicester Square)
- Description - National Library of Scotland (Not Digitised)
1841 - A view of the bombardment of St. Jean D'Acre, with the city and surrounding country
- Description - Archive.org
1842 - View of the city of Cabul, the capital of Affghanistan, with the surrounding country
- Panorama Key - Library of Congress
- Description - OpenLibrary.org
1843 - View of Baden Baden, the queen of the spas of Germany, with the surrounding beautiful country (Leicester Square)
- Description - National Library of Scotland (Not Digitised)
1843 - A view of the city of Coblentz, the fortress of Ehrenbreitstein, the Rhine, and the surrounding country (Leicester Square)
- Panorama Key - National Library of Scotland (Not Digitised)
- Description - Archive.org
1843 - View of Treport, the surrounding country and Chateau d'Eu
- Panorama Key - Yale University Library
- Panorama Key - The British Museum
- Related Painting, showing the event from the perspective of the shore - Royal Collection Trust
1844 - View of the ruins of the temples of Baalbec
- Panorama Key - Yale University Library
1844 - View of the island and bay of Hong Kong
- Description - OpenLibrary.org
1850 - Summer and winter views of the polar regions as seen during the expedition of Captain James Clark Ross
- Description - OpenLibrary.org
1855 - A view of the city of Sebastopol, and the surrounding fortifications; The Attack of the Allied Armies; The British and French Camps &c.
- Description - Archive.org
1856 - View of St. Petersburg and the surrounding country
- Description - OpenLibrary.org
1858 - View of the city of Delhi
- Description - Yale Center for British Art

Digital resources about Hornor's Colosseum

Below is a collection of links to online resources related to Hornor's Panorama from the top of St. Paul's Cathedral.

A brief account of the Colosseum, in the Regent's Park, London, by John Britton, published in 1829, is available online at sub-dresden.de. (OAI-Identifier: oai:de:slub-dresden:db:id-470852682) This book contains at the very end an illustration and key of the panorama, but the scan-quality is not that good.
The Panoramic View from the top of St. Paul's Cathedral, the Conservatory &c., printed by Goderoy Engelmann I, published in 1829, is available at The British Museum (Museum number: 1880,1113.1207.1-2)
A print of the same name, but with a slightly different style, is also available at The British Museum (Museum number: 1880,1113.1209.1-2)
A panorama key of Paris by Night, a panorama that was created for the Colosseum in 1848, can be found between pages 17-31 of The Colosseum and its Attractions …, published by W. M. Lendrum in 1874.

Architectural structure of Hornor's Colosseum

Architectural structure of the Colosseum.
Published in The London Literary Gazette, 1829-01-31, no. 628, page 75.
From the Internet Archive.

Table of References to the Plate.

Column or Tower in the centre of the building, for supporting the Ascending-Room, &c.
Entrance to the Ascending-Room.
Saloon for the reception of works of art.
Passage leading to the Saloon, Galleries, and Ascending-Room.
F. Two separate Spiral Flights of Steps, leading to the Galleries, &c.
H. I. Galleries from which the Picture is to be viewed.
Refreshment-Room.
Rooms for Music or Balls. The effect of either is delightful.
The Old Ball from St. Paul's Cathedral.
Stairs leading to the Outside of the Building.
b. Sky-lights.
Plaster Dome, on which the sky is painted.
Canvass on which the part of the picture up to the horizon is painted.
Gallery, suspended by ropes, used for painting the distance, and uniting the plaster and the canvass.
Temporary Bridge from the Gallery G to the Gallery e, from the end of which the echo of the building might be heard to the greatest advantage.
One of Fifteen Triangular Platforms, used for painting the sky.
Platforms fixed on the ropes of the Gallery e, used for finishing and clouding the sky.
Different methods for getting at the lower parts of the canvass.
Baskets for conveying colours, &c. to the artists.
Cross or Shears; formed of two poles, from which a cradle or box is suspended, for finishing the picture after the removal of all the scaffolding and ropes.

Giovanni Segantini – Letter to the people of Engadin (German)

Geehrte Herren Engadiner!

Das Projekt, welches ich Ihnen vorlese, geehrte Herren Engadiner, Söhne dieser Alpen, ist kühn, aber klar wie das Sonnenlicht, das diese unsere Berge beleuchtet. Ich bin der Welt as Maler des Hochgebirges bekannt. Meine Kunst ist zwischen der ernsten Majestät dieser Berge geboren und hat sich hier zu höheren Formen entwickelt. Meine Vorfahren waren Bergbewohner; der Geist der Alpen hat sich meinem Geiste mitgeteilt der ihn sofort ergriffen und auf der Leinwand wiedergegeben hat. Die Männer der Kunst fühlten diese neue Seele in meinem Werke, verstanden sie und waren davon überzeugt; denn unser Werk ist Geist und Stoff der Natur, und ich bin nur deren getreuer Dolmetsch. Und als Dolmetsch komme ich Ihnen, Herren Engadiner, ein ungeheures Werk anzubieten, das mir eingegeben wird von der stolzen Schönheit dieser Berge und von der dankbaren Liebe, die mich mit diesem herrlichen Stück der Natur verbindet, wegen den hohen Gefühlen und den künstlerischen Eingebungen, die ich von ihnen empfing und die mir die Stelle einbrachten, die ich in der Kunst besitze. Unser Engadin muß in der Welt mehr geschätzt und bekannt werden, und zu diesem Zwecke wird sich vielleicht niemals eine günstigere Gelegenheit darbieten, als jene, die uns die große Ausstellung gibt, die Paris am Ende des Jahrhunderts als Rendez-vous der Intelligenz und des Reichtums bietet. Ich dachte, es sollten alle die Schönheiten, die uns umgeben, in dieser gewaltigen Ausstellung ihren würdigen Platz finden, und habe das Projekt erdacht, das der Zweck unserer Versammlung ist und welches, verwirklicht, die höchste Auszeichnung unter dem Besten dieser zukünftigen Weltausstellung sein wird.

Es handelt sich, wie Ihnen schon bekannt ist, um ein gewaltiges Panorama, das die herrlichsten und hervorragendsten Punkte unseres Oberengadins darstellen und davon eine künstlerische Zusammenfassung sein soll. Dieses Panorama wird mit den andern, die man bisher sah, nichts zu tun haben. Ich beabsichtige das ganze feste Gerippe dieser Alpenjoche in ihrem vollen Lichte und der Klarheit der Luft auf die Leinwand zu bringen, indem ich im Beobachter die vollkommene Illusion erwecke, er befinde sich im Hochgebirge zwischen grünenden Weiden, umgeben von schroffen Felsen, die den Himmel durchzacken, und ewigen Gletschern, die in der Sonne funkeln, welche mit nie versiegendem frischem Wasser die waldigen Abhänge und unsere fruchtbaren Täler erfreuen, die wie smaragdene Mulden im Lichte lächeln.

Die Meisterschaft der Kunst, die durch langes Studium und große Liebe angesichts dieser Natur erreicht wurde, vermag das Licht, die Luft, die Entfernungen und den Hintergrund zu heben, den wahren Geist des Gebirgs mit seinem feierlichen Schweigen, seiner ernsten und erhabenen Poesie und dem lächelnden, tiefen Frieden, der nur unterbrochen wird von der lieblichen Musik der Alpen, von fernem Rauschen des Bergbaches bis zum Gelispel des Laubes, vom Gebrüll der Herden bis zum unbestimmten Geläute des auf den grasigen Abhängen weidenden Viehes.

Der Kunst wird die Wissenschaft zu Hilfe kommen, um den gewollten Effekt zu erzielen; wir werden elektrische Ventilatoren haben zur Erzeugung der Frische, verschiedene berechnete Anordnungen von Licht und Schatten, hydraulische Einrichtungen und akustische Werke, und alles, was am besten dazu dienen kann, die Vorstellung des Besuchers am vollständigsten und lebhaftesten zu machen, als befände er sich wirklich auf unsern Bergen.

Das im Hintergrund gemalte Panorama wird einen Umfang von 220 Meter umfassen und eine Höhe von 20 Meter haben, mit einer Oberfläche von 4400 Quadratmeter. Man begreift leicht, wie man bei einer solchen Ausdehnung des Gemäldes alle die schönsten Punkte darstellen und die größten Effekte der Entfernung haben kann, von den fernen Bergketten bis zu den nahen, imponierenden Massiven des Bernina und des Albula. Alle hauptsächlichsten Gegenden eines Tales werden daran teilnehmen, von St. Moritz, Samaden, Pontresina und Maloja, bis Silvaplana, Celerina, Sils und Bernina, getreulich dargestellt mit ihren malerischen Schönheiten, ihren Seen und ihren großen Hotels. Wie in einer künstlerischen Zusammenfassung wird sich in dem Blicke des Beschauers eine Ausdehnung von mehr als 20 Kilometer darstellen in ihren hervorragendsten Punkten, ein wirkliches Kompendium des Oberengadins.

Der Innenraum wird eine Oberfläche von 3850 Quadratmeter umfassen und im Zentrum wird ein Berghügel von 75 Meter Umfang und 16 Meter Höhe Platz finden, mit zwei Straßen, einem Auf- und Abstieg, die in geneigten Halbkreisen angelegt sind und von denen jede die Hälfte des Panoramas überblickt, das man vollständig von der obern Plattform überschaut. Diese Erhebung wird wahrheitsgetreu das Gebirge darstellen mit seinen Klippen, seinen Fichten und Arven, den senkrechten Felsen, den Spalten, dem mit Moos und Flechten bedeckten Gestein, den kleinen Brücken, den in die Schluchten stürzenden Bächen, den Büschen von Alpenrosen und wohlriechenden Kräutern, überhaupt alles, was wir wirklich sehen, wenn wir durch einen unserer Bergwege hinansteigen.

Der Raum zwischen dem Kreis des Panoramas und dem Aufstieg zur Aussicht wird 3397 Quadratmeter bei einer Breite von 23 Meter einnehmen, mehr als genügend, um den Blick zur gewollten Illusion vom Talgrund zu führen und fähig Ställe, Heuschober voll duftenden Heues, weidendes Vieh, sowie die verschiedenen Eigentümlichkeiten des Bodens und die bedeutendsten botanischen und zoologischen Varietäten unseres Landes aufzunehmen.

Die Besucher werden auf der einen Seite des Gebäudes eintreten und auf der entgegengesetzten hinausgehen. Eine in den Fels gehauene Galerie, mit Öffnungen, die sich wie natürliche Spalten von Zeit zu Zeit auf einzelne Stücke der Aussicht auftun, wird sie an den Fuß des Aufstieges führen. Eine andere ähnliche bedeckte Straße wird vom Fuß des Abstieges zum Ausgang leiten. Die Länge der Straße wird vom Eingang bis zu dem entgegengesetzten Ende 318 Meter und die Breite 2 Meter betragen, indem man annähernd einen Raum von 700 Quadratmeter berechnet, und wird bequem 2000 Besucher fassen können, die sich jede halbe Stunde erneuern würden, was in einem Tage von 8 Stunden die Gesamtsumme von 32000, in einem Monate von 960 000 und in 6 Monate von 5 760 000 Besuchern ergeben würde.

Das ganze, in Eisen errichtete Gebäude würde einen Gesamtraum von 3850 Quadratmeter einnehmen und hätte eine Höhe von 25 Meter mit einer Fassade von zirka 40 Meter Länge und 30 Meter Höhe, auf der ich in symbolischen Bildern alle Dörfer des Oberengadins abbilden würde.

Es blieben so noch 3200 Quadratmeter Außenwand übrig, die zur Reklame dienen könnten, aber davon, wie von sehr vielen andern Vorteilen (wie dem Verkaufe unserer ländlichen Produkte, den Namen der im Panorama selbst Platz findenden Gasthöfe usw.) spreche ich jetzt nicht, da man sich dieselben leicht vorstellen kann und sie zudem abhängig sind von den Eingebungen, die gewiß von den interessierten Kreisen in Überfluß kommen werden.

An der letzten Weltausstellung von Paris im Jahre 1889 hatte man 25 500 000 Besucher und in den fünf Monaten, während welchen der Eiffelturm in Betrieb war, erzielte man einem Gewinn von 5 500 000 Franken. Es genügen diese beredten Zahlen, um einen Begriff von dem Besuchsstrome der künftigen Ausstellung im Jahre 1900 zu geben, welche allgemein dafür angesehen wird, daß sie die vergangene in jeder Beziehung bei weitem übertreffen werde, infolge der offiziellen Teilnahme aller Rationen der Welt.

Letzte praktische, definitive Studien und die Vermehrung der bemalten Fläche um mehrere tausend Quadratmeter haben meinen ersten Voranschlag notwendigerweise abgeändert. Für das zum Unternehmen notwendige Kapital glaube ich nun, daß ein Voranschlag von 500 000 Franken den Erfolg sicherstellen könne. Diese Summe soll durch Aktien gezeichnet werden. Alle nötigen Auslagen werden durch eine, von den Aktionären erwählte Kommission geprüft, von der ich das Geld, je nachdem ich dessen allmählich bedarf, verlangen werde. Für die ersten Arbeiten brauche ich nicht mehr als 50 000 Franken. Ich verlange für mein Werk keinerlei vorausgehende Vergütung. Sowie die Aktionäre ihr volles Kapital erhalten, werde ich mit 25 Prozent am Gewinne teilhaben bis zu einem Reingewinn von einer halben Million, dann, d. h. von einer halben Million Reingewinnes aufwärts, mit 50 Prozent.

Als Garantie kann die Gesellschaft eine Kommission ernennen, welche nach Belieben von dem Fortschreiten meines Wertes Kenntnis nehmen kann. Mein Name, mein Charakter und meine Stellung in der Kunst werden gleichfalls für mich bürgen.

Wegen des Raumes müßten die Engadiner durch ihren Großratsabgeordneten offiziell die Regierung befragen. Indem dieser die nötigen Erklärungen abgibt, wie das Panorama einmal zu Ende geführt werden soll, würde die Regierung diesen Raum zugleich mit jenem verlangen, den sie sonst schon für den Rest der eigenen Ausstellung bedarf.

Nachdem ich so die Hauptzüge des Projekts ausgeführt habe, glaube ich nicht mich noch darüber verbreiten zu sollen, dessen Nutzen zu beweisen. Das Panorama wird der größte Anziehungspunkt der Pariser Weltausstellung sein und der Ruhm und der Name, die sich daraus für unser liebes Oberengadin ergeben werden, wird keine Kleinigkeit sein. Nach beendigter Ausstellung wird das Panorama mit der erworbenen Bekanntheit in den großen Städten der Welt zirkulieren. Es werden also mindestens 15 Jahre fortwährender Ausstellung und beständiger Reklame für unser Tal, das es so verdient, sein, in den reichsten Hauptstädten Europas und Amerikas. Schon von heute an wird die Presse, falls das Projekt beschlossen wird, uns drei Jahre beständige Reklame zum voraus bieten, indem sie sich mit demselben ausgiebig beschäftigt.

Ich bestehe auf nichts weiter. Die Klarheit liegt in den Grundzügen meiner Idee selbst. Ich danke Ihnen für die ernstliche Erwägung, welche Sie derselben gewürdigt, sowie für die freundliche Einladung zu dieser sympathischen Versammlung und bin zufrieden, wenn mein Werk das Ansehen und den Ruhm dieses unsres Tales vermehren können wird, das ich als mein natürliches Vaterland und die Eingeberin meiner Kunst verehre.

Giovanni Segantini – Letter to the people of Engadin (Translated)

Dear gentlemen of Engadin!

The project that I am reading to you, dear gentlemen of the Engadin, sons of these Alps, is bold but clear, like the sunlight that illuminates these mountains of ours. I am known to the world as a painter of the high mountains. My art was born among the solemn majesty of these mountains and has developed here into higher forms. My ancestors were mountain people; The spirit of the Alps communicated itself to my spirit, which immediately seized it and reproduced it on the canvas. The men of art felt this new soul in my work, understood it and were convinced of it; for our work is the spirit and substance of nature, and I am only its faithful interpreter. And as an interpreter I come to offer you, gentlemen of the Engadin, a tremendous work that was inspired to me by the proud beauty of these mountains and by the grateful love that connects me with this wonderful piece of nature, because of the high feelings and the artistic inspirations, which I received from them and which brought me the position I hold in art. Our Engadin must be more appreciated and known in the world, and for this purpose a more favorable opportunity will perhaps never present itself than that which the great exhibition gives us, which will make Paris at the end of the century a rendez-vous of intelligence and wealth offers. I thought that all the beauties that surround us should find their worthy place in this tremendous exhibition, and I conceived the project which is the purpose of our gathering and which, when realized, will be the highest distinction among the best of this future world exhibition .

As you already know, it is a huge panorama that represents the most magnificent and outstanding points of our Upper Engadin and is intended to be an artistic summary of them. This panorama will have nothing to do with the others that have been seen so far. I intend to bring the entire solid framework of these Alpine yokes onto the canvas in their full light and the clarity of the air, giving the observer the complete illusion that he is in the high mountains between green pastures, surrounded by rugged rocks that jagged the sky, and eternal glaciers that sparkle in the sun, which delight with never-ending fresh water the wooded slopes and our fertile valleys, which smile like emerald hollows in the light.

The mastery of art, achieved through long study and great love in the face of this nature, is able to elevate the light, the air, the distances and the background, the true spirit of the mountain with its solemn silence, its solemn and sublime poetry and the smiling, deep peace, which is only interrupted by the lovely music of the Alps, from the distant murmur of the mountain stream to the whisper of the leaves, from the roar of the herds to the vague ringing of the animals grazing on the grassy slopes.

Science will come to the aid of art to achieve the desired effect; we will have electric fans to produce freshness, various calculated disarrays of light and shade, hydraulic arrangements and acoustic works, and everything that can best serve to make the visitor's imagination most complete and vivid, as if he were really there on our mountains.

The panorama painted in the background will have a circumference of 220 meters and a height of 20 meters, with a surface of 4400 square meters. It is easy to understand how, with such an extent of the painting, one can represent all the most beautiful points and have the greatest effects of distance, from the distant mountain ranges to the nearby, impressive massifs of the Bernina and the Albula. All the main areas of a valley will take part, from St. Moritz, Samaden, Pontresina and Maloja, to Silvaplana, Celerina, Sils and Bernina, faithfully represented with their picturesque beauties, their lakes and their large hotels. As if in an artistic summary, the viewer will see an extension of more than 20 kilometers in its most outstanding points, a real compendium of the Upper Engadin.

The interior will cover a surface of 3850 square meters and in the center will accommodate a mountain hill 75 meters in circumference and 16 meters high, with two streets, an ascent and a descent, laid out in inclined semicircles, each of which covers half of the panorama which can be completely overlooked from the upper platform. This elevation will faithfully represent the mountains with their cliffs, their spruces and pine trees, their vertical rocks, their crevices, their rocks covered with moss and lichens, their small bridges, their streams cascading into the gorges, their bushes of alpine roses and fragrant herbs, In general, everything we really see when we climb up one of our mountain paths.

The space between the circle of the panorama and the climb to the view will occupy 3397 square meters with a width of 23 meters, more than enough to lead the eye to the desired illusion of the valley floor and see stables, haystacks full of fragrant hay, grazing animals, as well to record the various peculiarities of the soil and the most important botanical and zoological varieties of our country.

Visitors will enter from one side of the building and exit from the opposite. A gallery carved into the rock, with openings like natural crevices opening up from time to time to individual pieces of the view, will lead you to the foot of the climb. Another similar covered road will lead from the bottom of the descent to the exit. The length of the street will be 318 meters from the entrance to the opposite end and the width will be 2 meters, approximately calculating a space of 700 square meters, and will comfortably accommodate 2000 visitors who would renew every half hour, which in one Days of 8 hours would result in the total of 32,000, in a month of 960,000 and in 6 months of 5,760,000 visitors.

The entire building, made of iron, would take up a total area of 3850 square meters and would be 25 meters high with a facade about 40 meters long and 30 meters high, on which I would depict all the villages of the Upper Engadin in symbolic images.

There are still 3200 square meters of external wall left that could be used for advertising, but I'm not talking about that now, as well as many other advantages (such as the sale of our rural products, the names of the inns that are included in the panorama itself, etc.). They are easy to imagine and they also depend on inspiration, which will certainly come in abundance from interested parties.

The last Universal Exposition in Paris in 1889 had 25,500,000 visitors and in the five months during which the Eiffel Tower was in operation, a profit of 5,500,000 francs was achieved. These eloquent figures are sufficient to give an idea of the flow of visitors to the future exhibition in the year 1900, which is generally considered to have far exceeded the previous one in every respect, owing to the official participation of all the rations of the world.

Final practical, definitive studies and the increase of the painted area by several thousand square meters have necessarily modified my initial estimate. For the capital required for the company, I now believe that an estimate of 500,000 francs could ensure success. This sum is to be subscribed through shares. All necessary expenses will be examined by a commission elected by the shareholders, from which I will demand the money as I gradually need it. I don't need more than 50,000 francs for the initial work. I do not demand any prior compensation for my work. As soon as the shareholders receive their full capital, I will share 25 percent of the profits up to a net profit of half a million, then that means from half a million net profit upwards, with 50 percent.

As a guarantee, the company can appoint a commission, which can take note of the progress of my value at will. My name, my character and my position in art will also vouch for me.

Because of the space, the people of Engadin would have to officially question the government through their Grand Council representative. By giving the necessary explanations as to how the panorama should be completed, the government would demand this space at the same time as the space it would otherwise need for the rest of its own exhibition.

Having thus explained the main features of the project, I don't think I should go on about it to prove its usefulness. The panorama will be the biggest attraction of the Paris Universal Exposition and the fame and name that will result from it for our dear Upper Engadin will be no small thing. After the exhibition is over, the panorama will circulate in the major cities of the world with the fame it has acquired. So there will be at least 15 years of constant exhibition and constant advertising for our valley, which so deserves it, in the richest capitals of Europe and America. From today onwards, if the project is approved, the press will provide constant advertising for three years by dealing extensively with it.

I insist on nothing more. The clarity lies in the basic features of my idea itself. I thank you for the serious consideration which you have given to it, as well as for the friendly invitation to this sympathetic meeting and I am satisfied if my work can increase the prestige and fame of this valley of ours, which I revere as my natural fatherland and the inspiration of my art.

Printing Martin Behaim's Globe

2023-05-09T00:00:00+00:00

I recently was looking through Wikipedia’s Early World Maps article, and stumbled upon the oldest surviving globe from 1492 called the Erdapfel, German for ‘Earth Apple’. The globe was produced by German merchant and cartographer Martin Behaim, compiling knowledge of the world from various explorers and geographers.

Martin Behaim's Erdapfel
© 2019 Germanisches Nationalmuseum, CC BY-SA-4.0, Wikimedia Commons.

A full 360 view of the globe can be found on YouTube.

The Americas are not featured on the globe as news of the new continent would only reach Spain in 1493, a year after the globe’s creation. But there are other problems, such as the earth’s circumference being too small (which explains why there isn’t even room to add the Americas), the Deccan peninsula (India) being non-existent, and Southeast Asia and Japan being hyper-exaggerated. Not all mistakes are attributed to Behaim, though one researcher describes Behaim as “not a careful compiler”.⁠^[1]

But for all its flaws, the globe is an artistic masterpiece, featuring hundreds of place names, over a hundred illustrations, and several anecdotes from travellers like Marco Polo.

Annotations cover the entire globe.
© 2019 Germanisches Nationalmuseum, CC BY-NC-ND-4.0, gnm.de.

This post won’t cover the fascinating details of globe itself; Ernst Georg Ravenstein in 1908 has already done this. You can find his transcripts and commentary of all the annotations on the globe in the book Martin Behaim, his life and his globe.

What piqued my interest looking on Wikipedia was the following image that Ravenstein made. A recreation of the globe in “12 globe gores and 2 polar calottes”.

Composite of Globe Gores 1-4: Facsimile of Behaim's Globe
By E. G. Ravenstein, published 1908, David Rumsey Map Collection.

This recreation is not an exact copy. The illustrations, colours, typography look slightly different to the original globe. But the substance is the same, down to the corrupt spellings of place names. Ravenstein seems to have started research in 1899⁠^[2] and published his work in 1908, including carefully studying other facsimiles that were made in the past. It’s astounding the amount of effort Ravenstein put into this.

A high-resolution scanned copy of the manuscript can be found at the David Rumsey Map Collection, in 4 parts. They also have reprojected the map into other projections, including an interactive globe!

The arrangement of gores and calottes made it very tempting to see what it would look like assembled as a globe. So that’s exactly what I’ve decided to do here!

Constructing the Globe

The original globe is roughly 50cm in diameter.⁠^[3]

I had no interest in recreating a 1:1 scale of the globe, but it would technically be possible to create one with just an A4 printer if one cut the gores into northern and southern hemispheres.

Instead I decided to go for a 20cm diameter globe. So in a graphical editor I extracted the shapes of the gores and calottes. I then wrote a script that would scale the images to the dimensions I needed to print. To save paper, I used a box-packing solver to optimise which images fit on as few pages as possible.

I then printed the images using an inkjet printer with 120 gsm paper.

To stitch them together I cut out the pieces with a hobby knife, making sure to include triangular tabs on some of the edges so the pieces can be glued together.

I’m happy with the globe, but some improvements could be made.

Firstly, I probably should have gone for a 25cm diameter globe, as a lot of the text is too small to read. It also doesn’t help that the original scan has gold on blue which makes the text illegible.

Secondly, I should have had more patience glueing it together. As I worked my way round the globe I got better at getting the tabs to stick, but the initial sections (Africa/Europe) don’t look great. I could have also planned placing the polar calottes better, since the tops are a bit wonky.

I want my own Behaim globe!

Well then you’re in luck! All you need is an A4 printer with decent print quality and thick paper (Ideally something better than 120 gsm). Below are printouts for globes in various sizes.

20 cm diameter (5 pages)
25 cm diameter (6 pages)
50 cm diameter (26 pages)

If you need a more specific resolution, you can also use the scripts I’ve written at erdapfel-papercraft on GitHub.

Note: Technically these PDFs are licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA, 3.0, as they are derivatives from David Rumsey’s Map Collection. Arguably, scanned copies of material that is in the public domain is not copyrightable, but I’m not a lawyer.

Citations

^ E. G. Ravenstein, Martin Behaim, his life…, p. 70
^ E. G. Ravenstein, Martin Behaim, his life…, p. 62. It's not stated when he actually started research, but 1899 was the earliest year I could find.
^ F. Menna et al., High Resolution 3d Modeling…, p. 116

References

Martin Behaim, his life and his globe – Ernst Georg Ravenstein, published by G. Philip & Son, ltd., 1908
High Resolution 3d Modeling of the Behaim Globe – Menna, F., Rizzi, A., Nocerino, E., Remondino, F., and Gruen, A. published in ISPRS: International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, 115-120, 2012

Mapping the Scottish Colony 'New Caledonia'

2023-04-02T00:00:00+00:00

Scottish independence has been in the news for a while, especially given the escalating conflict and tension between Holyrood and Westminster Parliaments. Several writers, pundits, and politicians have written hundreds of articles for-and-against independence, and it’ll probably stay that way for years to come.

Every⁠^[1] now⁠^[2] and⁠^[3] then,⁠^[4] some writer will bring up the old tale called The Darien Scheme. It’s commonly known as Scotland’s catastrophic failure to create a colony called ‘New Caledonia’ during the late 1690s in Darien, Panama. Typically the writer uses it as a narrative-device to imply that the Scottish independence movement would repeat history and result in a similar economic and national disaster. That rhetoric may convince some people, however the same writers are typically supporters of political parties that support Brexit, so make of that what you will…

But every time the story of the Darien Scheme came up, I kept wondering about the details of the venture. Where in Panama was it? How big was the settlement? What was the landscape like?

Several articles I read on the topic weren’t that insightful. While they had some neat photos that described the climate and vegetation, I wanted details about the settlement itself!

To remedy this gap in knowledge, this post will:

explore the geo-political landscape of the late 1690s,
share some historical maps of ‘New Caledonia’, and
provide context of what it looks like today.

The Darien Scheme?

A quick-ish recap, for those unfamiliar…

It was the 1690s and Scotland was in trouble. A prolonged famine, war, and economic pressure from England, meant Scotland had to grow to survive.

One of several solutions proposed was colonialism. 200 years after Columbus’s discovery of America, colonial powers including Spain, Portugal, France, and England had a strong foothold in America. While Scotland had already tried creating North American settlements in Nova Scotia, New Jersey, and Carolina, these were largely unsuccessful due to indigenous, Spanish, English, and even Royal opposition. A different strategy was needed…

By the end of the 1600s, Spain, Portugal, France, and England already had a major presence spanning both hemispheres of America.⁠^[5] In desperation, Scotland sailed to the isthmus of Panama hoping for a breakthrough.

The new strategy was bold and ambitious – Setup a colony on the narrow isthmus of Panama which can then be used to connect the Atlantic and Pacific for trade. Today the country of Panama is well known for its canal and its major role in global trade, so the general idea was not that bad. But it was definitely ambitious, especially for Scotland.

But alas, it was a disaster.

The first expedition with 1,200 settlers made landfall in November 1698. Eight months later the settlement was abandoned due to illness, famine, and trade embargoes from the English (encouraged by King William Ⅱ/Ⅲ). Before news had reached Scotland, a second expedition with another 1,300 settlers arrived in November 1699. Four months later, the colony suffered a similar fate, but its collapse was hastened by the Spanish sieging the settlement.

Thousands of people died, Scotland lost a fifth of its wealth,⁠^[6] and the nation was demoralized.

Some historians say the Darien Scheme lead directly to the 1707 Act of Union, which united England and Scotland into the Kingdom of Great Britain (But others might down-play its role, and instead say it was the 1705 Alien Act that finally triggered it.)

This BBC History archive provides some more detail on the scheme. For further reading I’d also recommend The Darien Disaster by John Prebble.

But where in Panama was this settlement?

New Caledonia Bay

The location the settlement was not chosen on a whim.

Very precise instructions were given to the ship navigators, however they were kept secret to avoid interception by the English and Spanish. Only after reaching Madeira, a stopover island near Africa, were the ship navigators given permission to open instructions.

The instructions read:

You are hereby ordered in pursuance of your voyage to make the Crab Island, and if you find it free to take possession thereof in name of the Company; and from thence you are to proceed to the Bay of Darien, and make the Isle called the Golden Island, in and about eight degrees of north latitude; and there make a settlement on the mainland as well as the said island, if proper (as we believe) and unpossessed by an European nation or state in amity with his Majesty.⁠^[7]

But this part of the world was hardly “unpossessed” by European nations…

New Caledonia was established in an area well settled by the Spanish Empire. For example, Nombre de Dios was 230km away from it, which at 5 knots is only a day away.

Panama already had quite a few Spanish settlements; The Scottish knew this, and took a gamble anyway.

So why did they pick this spot exactly?

I couldn’t find any specific quotes, but looking at it practically, there are three perks: It’s fairly distant from Spain’s biggest settlement ‘Portobelo’, it’s a short travel-distance across the isthmus, and finally, the alluring name ‘Golden Island’ was perhaps a selling point.

What the Scots were not prepared for was the climate, the terrain, and the vegetation. It’s constantly raining, the hills hard to traverse, and the area is covered in rainforest. Traversing ~65 kilometers through what is known today as the ‘Darien Gap’ would be painful. The Scottish Company planning the scheme were warned by the experienced explorer Lionel Wafer, but those warnings were completely ignored. In fact, they regarded not settling a colony at Darien as a “stupid oversight” by the Spanish.⁠^[8]

By the time the first ships arrived at Golden Island in November 1698, hundreds of passengers will have died to illness. To make their journey worthwhile, they next had to create a settlement.

Map of the Bay of Caledonia and it's surroundings. To the north-west are the Sambalas Isles, a collection of small islands.

After looking around the coastline for a few days, they settled in a nearby bay with good shelter and defense and called their new home ‘New Caledonia’. Several months later they would have dozens of huts built and setup the palisade walls for ‘Fort St. Andrew’.

All of it would be in ruins in less than a year.

My artistic rendering of Fort St. Andrew. The fort housed dozens of huts. A wall and moat were constructed to protect against land invasion.

Historical Maps

During my research I managed to find several maps of the colony, but I’ve selected a few that each have a unique perspective.

We’ll start off with the map that seems to be published the most in books and news articles.

An Optimistic Report from the First Expedition

Map of New Caledonia by Herman Moll, drafted in 1699, published in the 1720s.
Full resolution available at the Nationaal Archief. Licensed under CC0.

The first map is a surprisingly accurate map of the bay, and appears to be based on reports from the first expedition that arrived in Panama. While we know that Herman Moll made the map, I couldn’t find any information about who originally drafted the map. It could not have been Moll himself because he was not part of the expedition.

Whoever the original author was, it’s still interesting to highlight the paragraph in the top-right of the map.

We found the ground near Golden Island very foul and rocky, full of deep holes and uncertain soundings. But within the rock in the bay is very good anchor ground, and here is plenty of excellent good water. Ships may enter the bay at either side of the rock but the East side is the best. 𝐀. Place where upon digging for stones to make an oven at 𝐁., a considerable mixture of gold was found in them. Wood increases here prodigiously for tho many scores of acres we cleared, yet in a few months after it was so overgrown as if no body had been there.

Doesn’t sound too bad right? Safe harbour, gold, and fertile land!

Firstly, the rocks in the harbour did make maneuvering ships inconvenient and a constant hazard.⁠^[9] Secondly, the discovery of gold was an exaggeration.⁠^[10] And finally, while there was plenty of vegetation and wood, the colonists spent months clearing room for the fort. They never even managed to setup a plantation.⁠^[11]

The fort’s ground surface was also questionable. Taking a closer look at the map, the area beneath Fort St. Andrew is labelled ‘Morais’, which is probably the old english spelling for ‘morass’ – a marsh or swamp. In reality, the whole region consisted of unstable ground and the constant rains turned all the paths into “runnels of mud”.⁠^[12]

To the south of the fort is a plot of land labelled ‘New Edinburgh’. I could not find any references explaining what the plot of land was used for, but it’s either a planned site for buildings, or it was the initial location where camps were setup when the first expedition arrived.⁠^[13] No other maps I could find describe any settlements along the coastline. Keep in mind that this is a kilometer or more away from the fort, so it probably would not be convenient to build infrastructure so far away.

There are several other details that may be misleading to someone not familiar with antique maps, such as the hill and tree illustrations. While it looks like a meadow populated with sparse trees, it’s actually a dense rainforest. The peninsula also isn’t a collection of hills, it’s one massive hill reaching 180 meters. This isn’t the fault of the map-maker, this is just how maps were stylised at the time.

I’ve found that this map is probably referenced the most in online articles and YouTube documentaries, mainly because it’s pretty nice looking.

But there are other maps, albeit less appealing, such as this next map by a missioner…

A Missioners Account of the Second Expedition

Map by Francis Borland, published in Memoirs of Darien, 1715.
Full resolution available at the Archive.org.

This second map is by Francis Borland, a Scottish Presbyterian missioner for the Church of Scotland. He was on the second expedition to Panama, and arrived upon the shores of New Caledonia expecting to find the bustling town of New Edinburgh. The stark reality shocked the new settlers as they discovered burnt down structures and an overgrown fort.⁠^[14] The news of the first colony’s collapse hadn’t reached them when they set sail. Amazingly, and perhaps foolishly, they had the courage to rebuild.

While the map is a crude illustration, it makes up for it with detail.

I like the map because it shows details like rivers (‘Acla the greater’, and ‘Acla the lesser’), the nearby villages of indigenous people, and even the different types of vegetation. The rivers and villages were only about 5 kilometers away from the fort, but navigating through the trees, streams, and steep hills was exhausting and took a whole day to reach.⁠^[15]

Unfortunately, the map does not show any details about the colony itself, but it does show the ‘watering place’, labelled w, located just outside the fort. Its location will play an important role later when the Spanish arrive.

Considering this was sketched out by a minister I would say it’s a fairly decent map that gets the details right. At least, compared to other maps I’ve seen.

The map does hint of our story’s conclusion – Labelled R, “About this Bay, the Spaniards landed men against us”…

The Spanish Empire Strikes Back

Four months after the new colony was setup, the Spanish had enough of the Scots encroaching on their territory; especially after a recent skirmish by the Scots at a nearby Spanish outpost called Tubacanti.⁠^[16]

The next two maps were made by Royal Engineer Don Juan de Herrera y Sotomayor, which document how the Spanish sieged New Caledonia. Of all the maps that I found, these were the highest quality, and it demonstrates the surveying and intelligence capabilities of the Spanish Army. The Spanish understood that the Scots were wind-locked in the bay and any escape would be very difficult.⁠^[17] The bay was surrounded by Spanish sea forces, people were still dying from sickness, and supplies were limited. It was only a matter of time before the Scots would capitulate.⁠^[18]

This first map tells the story of how the Spanish approached the fort over a period of over 3 weeks. The map is a little simplistic with the timeline, as there were several skirmishes between the Scots and the Spanish throughout the siege. The Spanish first landed on Caret Bay on March the 10th, several kilometers away from Caledonia Bay. On March the 28th, the Spanish reached the woods outside of the fort. Two days later the Spanish even managed to land an artillery battery pointed straight at the fort only 250 meters away. Finally, on March the 31st, the Scots capitulated.⁠^[19]

Map showing the bay and the fort, made by Herrera in 1700. Spanish camps and a trail were established along the coast, eventually reaching the Scottish Fort.
Full version available at the Spanish Archives.

The Scottish settlement called Caledonia

Rancho Viejo where the Spanish Armada anchored

Caret Bay where the first landing was made on March 10th

First shelter made on land

Here we first clashed with enemy guards on March 11th

Bay where the second landing was made on March 30th and the camp in the letter E. was ambushed

Third camp where we stayed on March 31st

Fourth camp where we stayed on April 4th

Fifth camp where we stayed on April 6th at the top of the hill

Sixth camp where we stayed on April 7th and where the artillery was landed

Scottish Watchtower

Point where the first batteries were deployed

It’s interesting to see that the Scots had lookouts in two places, E and M. One at the tip and one at the neck of the peninsula.

The next map shows a close up view of the Spanish army’s siege at Fort St. Andrew.

Map of the fortifications in and around Fort St. Andrew, made by Herrera in 1700.
Full resolution available at the Spanish Archives.

Scottish fortifications

Scottish warehouses

Scottish batteries

Spanish fortifications for the primary quarters

Spanish fortifications for an outpost

Spanish outpost for grenadiers for the main attack

First batteries that were used against the settlement

Second batteries that were not finished because they surrendered

Spanish Outpost

Where the artillery was landed

Paths to the settlement

The Scottish Flag

Accommodations

The map shows the position of the Spanish army camps half a kilometer away. Based on the dates of the previous map, it seems like this camp was setup after the Scots capitulated, but the artillery at G was definitely setup before then.

The map also shows the general layout of the fort, which no other map of New Caledonia I’ve come across includes. In the center were all the huts used as accommodations, and on the edges of the fort were warehouses and artillery. At the top edge is a nice illustration of a tree flying the Scottish Red Ensign Flag.

On the top-right edge of the fort is a large building which was probably the warehouse that had been converted later by the Spanish commander Don Juan Pimienta as the “first temple, where the first mass was said, consecrating the place to Saint Charles”.⁠^[20]

Of particular note is the water stream in the lower-left. This stream was used by the Scots as their fresh-water supply. But because it was located half a mile away from the fort, and was completely surrounded by the Spanish at the final stages of the siege, the distressed Scots had to drink “brackish, puddle-unwholesome water” from within the palisade walls.⁠^[21]

It’s likely that several aspects of the map shouldn’t be interpreted literally. For example, while the walls of the fort appear to look like stone on the map, in reality the fortifications were palisade walls mostly made up of wood.

After conquering the settlement, the Spanish tried to keep a foothold with 200 men in New Caledonia for almost a year. But in a report written in April 1701, a Spanish admiral claims that the majority of men had either deserted, died from illness, or were attacked by pirates. The settlement, renamed “Plaza Caledonia”, was abandoned later that year.⁠^[22]

Modern Maps

300 years later, what’s left of the settlement?

Satellite imagery is very hard to come by in this region of the world as clouds are constantly obstructing the view. Google Maps has very low resolution imagery, making it useless. Bing Maps is a bit cloudy, but it’s possible to see individual trees. But looking from above that’s all one can see – just trees. 🌴

Thankfully several archeological expeditions have been made to investigate the site more closely.

According to a BBC article, the only thing left is the trench that the settlers dug for the fort. The article has some pictures.

One expedition in 1979, named “Operation Drake”, surveyed the site and collected various artifacts. Christopher Sainsbury has published photos of this expedition on Flickr.

Another expedition in the early 2000s discovered some structures including what appears to be an oven. From this expedition a BBC documentary titled “Darien - A Disaster in Paradise” was created. The full documentary no longer appears to be publicly available, but one of the archaeologists has shared a clip online.

Another BBC article from 2005 shows a computer-generated image of the settlement from an exhibition held in Panama or possibly for the aforementioned BBC documentary. Their recreation shows 190 huts, a few warehouses on the coast, and an outline of the fortifications. This roughly matches the layout shown in Herrera’s maps.

A digital recreation of the settlement showing Fort St. Andrew, produced by the University of Bristol.
Sourced from BBC and UoB.

Conclusion

So it turns out we actually know a fair amount about New Caledonia! More than I had originally anticipated anyway. While we don’t have a full map of every building of the settlement, we do have a rough idea of how the colony was organized, partially in thanks to the maps by Spanish Engineer Herrera y Sotomayor. There’s also several written accounts of the colony, which without would not have made it possible to corroborate the information shown on the maps.

This post focused mainly on historical maps, but during my research I discovered there’s some recent map news relevant to New Caledonia!

Until fairly recently, the bay was called ‘Puerto Escocés’, Spanish for Scottish Port. In 2011 the Panama’s National Assembly renamed it ‘Sukunya Inabaginya’.⁠^[23] The new name honours General Inabaginya, who, unlike the Scots, succeeded in making the area habitable in 1914 and was a huge support for the local community.⁠^[24] So now, by law, maps should no longer display the name Puerto Escocés.

I thought this might be the “final death” of the Scot’s legacy in Panama as their presence is erased from the map. But it turns out the locals in a nearby village have continued to pay tribute to the Scottish people by naming their island Caledonia. So, for now at least, the Darien scheme’s legacy will continue to live on the maps of Panama.

Appendix

During my research I discovered several historical maps of the colony, which I’ve listed in the table below. The first four in the list are maps discussed above. The rest are maps that I felt didn’t really add more detail to the story, as some maps appear to be derivatives of other maps.

	The Scots Settlement in America, called New-Caledonia, A.D. 1699 Nationaal Archief
	Memoirs of Darien Archive.org
	Descricsion geográphica hidrográphica del parage que poblaron y fortificaron los escorseses en la costa y prouincia del dariel llamado por ellos nueba Calidonia Spanish Archives
	Planta Topográphica é ignográphica del parage que pobló y fortificasión que hizo la nasión escorsesa nombrado por ellos nueba calidonia en las costas del darien Spanish Archives
	Plano Del Puerto dela Calidonia Virtual Defense Library
	Map promoting Scotland’s “Darien Scheme” in Panama Boston Rare Maps
	Rade du Darien et les isles voisines David Rumsey Map Collection
	A New Map of the Isthmus of Darian in America & Bay of Panama The Gulph of St. Michal with Its Islands, & Countries Adjacent JCB Map Collection
	Carte Particuliere de Isthmus ou Darien qui Comprend le Golfe de Panama &c. Cartagena, et les Isles aux Environs RareMaps.com
	An exact draught of the gulf of Darien & the coast to Porto Bello with Panama in the south sea & the Scotch settlement in Calledonia Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education center
	A contemporary manuscript map of Darien Daniel Crouch Rare Books

The maps in the beginning section were created by me and are based on OpenStreetMap data and SRTM elevation data. The source code for the first three maps can be found on GitHub at new-caledonia-maps. The birds-eye view illustration is a composition of 3D terrain software and vector illustration.

I’d also like to give credit to Julie M. Orr for including the Spanish maps by Herrera y Sotomayor. I only discovered the maps through their thesis, and haven’t seen anyone else reference the maps in any other publicly available works. The maps were really helpful for providing a second perspective in the story.

Citations

^ Chalmers, “… From Darien to Faslane”
^ Ho, “… another Darien Disaster”
^ Hogg, “… new Darien scheme”
^ Dickie, “… economic plan 'another Darien' …”
^ The coloured borders used in the illustration of the globe should be taken with a pinch of salt. They represent areas where the empires had a presence and influence but not necessarily full authority. The borders were derived from this Wikipedia map of the world in 1700.
^ Carroll, “The sorry story …”
^ Prebble, The Darien Disaster, p. 141
^ Prebble, The Darien Disaster, p. 85
^ Prebble, The Darien Disaster, p. 154
^ Prebble, The Darien Disaster, p. 187
^ Prebble, The Darien Disaster, p. 201
^ Prebble, The Darien Disaster, p. 213
^ Prebble, The Darien Disaster, p. 157
^ Prebble, The Darien Disaster, p. 257
^ Prebble, The Darien Disaster, p. 267
^ Prebble, The Darien Disaster, p. 184, 281. Also spelled Toubacanti. I was unable to find the exact location of Tubacanti, but it was somewhere in the hills between Rio Sabanas on the pacific coast and New Caledonia on the Atlantic coast.
^ Orr, New Caledonia's Wake, p. 224
^ Orr, New Caledonia's Wake, p. 226
^ Prebble, The Darien Disaster, p. 310-319
^ Orr, New Caledonia's Wake, p. 233
^ Prebble, The Darien Disaster, p. 316-317
^ Orr, New Caledonia's Wake, p. 235
^ García, “Two laws …”
^ Panama National Assembly, Law 145, 2010

References

Scottish independence: ‘From Darien to Faslane’ – Malcolm Chalmers, published by The Scotsman, 2012
COMMENT: Scottish independence risks another Darien Disaster – Geoff Ho, published by Express, 2014
Readers’ Letters: Independence could be new Darien scheme – Ian Hogg, published by The Scotsman, 2021
Nicola Sturgeon’s economic plan ‘another Darien’ that would ruin country says former government adviser – Douglas Dickie, published by Scottish Daily Express, 2022
The sorry story of how Scotland lost its 17th century empire – Rory Carroll, published by The Guardian, 2007 (Archive.org)
The Darien Disaster – John Prebble, published by Penguin Books, 1970 (OpenLibrary.org)
New Caledonia’s Wake: Expanding the Story of Company of Scotland Expeditions to Darien, 1698-1700 - Orr, J. M., published by University of Dundee, 2014 (University of Dundee)
Two laws that enshrine the name of Inabaginya – Simón Herrera García, published by Panamá América, 2021 (Archive.org)
Law 145, 30th of March 2010 – Panama’s National Assembly, published 2010 (Yumpu.com)
Law 64, 9th of August 2011 – Panama’s National Assembly, published 2011 (GacetaOficial.gob.pa)

Transcripts

For discoverability, below are text transcripts for some of the maps and documents referenced in this post.

Herman Moll's Map

The SCOTS Settlement in AMERICA called NEW CALEDONIA. A.D. 1699. Lat. 8D.-30 North. According to an Origenal Draught By H. Moll Geographer

The Bay of Caledonia lies about 9 Leagues West of the Gulf of Darien.

wee found the Ground near Golden Island very foul and Rocky full of deep holes and uncertain Soundings, But within the Rock in the Bay is very good Anchor ground, and here is plenty of Excelent good water, Ship may enter the Bay at either side of the Rock but the East side is the best. A Place where upon Diggin for Stones to make an Oven at B. a considerabel mixture of Gold was found in them. Wood increases here Prodigiously for tho many scores of Acres wee cleared, yet in a few Months after it was so overgrown as if no body had been there.

Golden Island
Point Look Out
The Outhward Bay of Caledonia
Fort St. Andrew
A Rock
Morais
New Edinburgh
Pt. Desire
The Inward Bay of Caledonia
NEW CALEDONIA
DARIEN
THE GREAT BAY

Francis Borland's Map

See the Following MAPP of this NECK and Harbour, with a Plenary Explication thereof.

a Shows the Isle of Pines
b Golden Island.
c where the Spanish Fleet did rid:
d Brandies Bay.
e Acla the Greater.
h CALEDONIA Harbour and Rock.
i The Look out.
k Mountains and Woods.
l Rocks.
m The Plantan Tree.
n The Narrow Neck.
o The Orange Grove.
p Indian Habitations.
r Little Islands and Rocks,
s Indian dwellings.
t Acla the Lesser.
v Mountains and Woods.
w The watering place.
u The Maccaw-Tree, full or prickles
x The Orange-Tree.
y The Fort.
z The Cockernut-Tree
I The wild Cabage-Tree.
C Caret-Bay river and Indians dwelling Westward
R About this Bay, the Spaniards landed men against us,
N North.
S South.
E East.
W West.

Herrera's Map of the Bay

Disclaimer: I'm not that familiar with Spanish, and I'm definitely not familiar with 17th-century cursive Spanish, so there are definitely some transcript errors here.

A Poblasion de los escorceses llamada Calidonia
B Rancho Viejo donde dieron fondo la Armada espanõla
C Puerto de carreto donde se hizo el desembarco primero a 10 de marzo
D Primer ampamiento que se hizo en tiera
E la gran guardia del enemigo donde el sia 11 de maare se dio elprimer choque
F Caleta donde se hizo el segundo desenbarco el día treinta marzo y se fumo el campo enla letra E.
G Campo tercero donde se alojo el día treinta y uno de marzo
H Campo quarto en lo also de la fierra donde se alojo en día 4de abril
I Campo quinto donde se alojo el día 6de abril enlo alto de [...] colina
L Campo sexto donde se alojo el día 7 de abril [...] Caraleta del mar y donde se de sembarco la artilleria
M Vigía de los escorsesses
N Punta donde se forms la primea bateria

Deseriesion geographica hidrographica del paraje que poblaron y fortificason los escorseses en la Costa y provincia del dariel llamado por ellos Nueba Calidonia Sugeto alas Armas del Catolico Monarca Don Carlos Segundo que Dios Guarde el día onze de Abril de 1700 al por sitio que les puso el exmo Senõr Don Juan Dias Pimienta Cauallero delorden de Calatraua dentil hombre de la Camara del Senõr Emperador del Real y Supremo Consejo de guerra Maestro de Campo general delos exersitos Fe su Magestad y su gobernadr y Capitán general de la Ciudad de Cartagena y su provinsia

Por el

Sargento mayor don Juan Gerrera y Sotomaior ingeniero por su Magestad

Herrera's Map of the Fortifications

Disclaimer: I'm not that familiar with Spanish, and I'm definitely not familiar with 17th-century cursive Spanish, so there are definitely some transcript errors here.

Explicasion del ta Planta

A Fortificasion de los escorceses
B Almacenes de los escorceses
C Baterías de los escorceses
D Fortificasion y quartel principal de los Españoles
E Fortificasion y puesto avanzado de los Españoles
F Principio de ataque y puesto de los granaderos
G Batería primera que se hizo contra la plaza
H Batería segunda que no lego a acabarse por averse rendido la plaza
I Puesto avanzado de Españoles
L Parase donde se desembarco la artilleria
M Caminos que van a la plaza
N La bandera escorcesa
O Alojamientos de la plaza

Planta

Topographica Eignographica de l paraje que poblo y fortificasion que hizo la nation escosesa nombrado por ellos nueba Caelidonia on las costas del dariel. Rendida alas armas del catolico Monarca Don Carlos Segundo ol dia onze de abril del año 1700 ponfitio que les puso el Erms Senõr Don Juan dies pimienta Cauadero del onden de calatraua gentil hombre. de la Camara del Senõr Emperado del Real y Supremo Conseso de guerra Maestro de Campo General de los erersitos de su Magestad y su Gobernador y Capitan General de la Ciudad de Cartagena y su prabinsia.

Por el

Sargento maior Don Juan de Herrera y Soto Mayor ingeniero Militar por su Magestad

Panama's National Assembly Law 145, 30th of March 2010

Señor Presidente:

Haciendo uso de la iniciativa parlamentaria consagrada en el artículo 108 del Reglamento Orgánico del Régimen Interno, presento el Anteproyecto "Por la cual se denomina Puerto Escocés a Puerto Inabaginya", la cual merece la siguiente exposición de motivo:

EXPOSICION DE MOTIVOS

Actualmente el pueblo kuna cuenta con un lugar histórico y sagrado, conocido como Puerto Escocés o asentamiento escocés, como lo llamó en su momento la Doctora Reina Torres de Arauz. Durante los años 1698 1699 y 1700 los escoceses trataron de establecerse en un lugar conocido como Sukunya u Ordinag, que está ubicado entre las comunidades de Yansip Diwar (carreto) y Kannirtup (caledonia), Comarca Kuna Yala. El pueblo de Escocia tenía la misión de establecer una colonia para el comercio mundial, pero ello sólo se logró con la atinada intervención del General Inabaginya en 1914, quien encontró el lugar deshabitado y peligroso por las enfermedades del pasado.

Estuvo trabajando y saneando el lugar junto con los grandes y famosos curanderos de aquellos años. Actualmente, los kunas de las comunidades de Sasardi Mulatupu cuentan en Puerto Escocés con plantaciones de plátanos, guineos, aguacates y otros productos vegetales.

Para muchos kunas, el lugar es una de las más grandes civilizaciones que se haya dado incluso en toda la historia de América Latina. Los kunas saben que, históricamente, muchos escoceses perdieron sus vidas por el brote de epidemia que se desató en el sitio.

Los indígenas no soñaban con tener grandes plantaciones. Se conformaban trabajando por el monte, tener a la familia unida y vivir felices. Mientras, los escoceses habían llegado para hacer grandes fortunas ya que Escocia había vislumbrado y soñado para establecer un centro de comercio mundial para intercambiar sus products a diferentes del mundo para así sacar a Escocia de la pobreza.

Los escoceses narraban los hechos y la forma trágica y peligrosa como describían el lugar, demostrando la valentía y la osadía que tuvo el Cacique Inabaginya para sanear el lugar. Uno de los que describió el lugar como "malsano", "insalubre" para permanecer allí fue el reverendo Francis Barland, quien ejerció el Ministerio hasta 1722 cuando murió. Las comunidades Sasardi Muladup y Sasardi Nuevo son los dueños de las plantaciones en el sitio. Ellos trabajaron duro para tener las plantaciones que tienen actualmente. Inabaginya había invitado a shailas de otras comunidades para que juntos trabajaran en Sukunya u Ordinag, pero ellos no aceptaron.

Cuando los sahilas de otras comunidades creían que era difícil vivir allí por los males y las enfermedades que había, Ina nunca se dejó llevar por eso; por el contrario, consultó con varios neles y, a pesar de que todos le decían que no se podía sanear el lugar, él siguió con su idea hasta que al fin un gran nele le dio esperanzas. Allí empezó el trabajo de hacer habitable a Puerto Escocés; llamó a grandes neles para que cazaran y ahuyentaron animals que estaban causando problemas y diferentes calamidades. Después de varios meses de trabajo arduo, en los que se involucró toda la comunidad, se superaron todos los obstáculos.

La comunidad de Mulatupu celebró este hecho con una chicha fuerte y así fue que la gente de Mulatupu empezó a tener sus fincas en Sukunya u Ordinag. Hoy en día, como sabemos la gente se queda allí por varios días o meses para realizar sus trabajos y así traer sus alimentos para sus familias, gracias a la visión que tuvo el Cacique Inabaginya:

Honorables Diputados, por las razones expuestas, y por la trascendencia e importancia de la tesonera labor del Cacique Inabaginya, es de justicia que la comunidad cambie su nombre actual por el de Inabaginya, ya que así honraría el pueblo kuna a tan prestigioso e histórico luchador indígena. Este es el deseo del pueblo kuna, el cual recogemos en la presente propuesta de anteproyecto de ley.

H.D, ABSAÓN HERRERA GARCIA
Cirquito 10-2

"POR LA CUAL SE DENOMINA PUERTO ESCOCES A PUERTO INABAGINYA"

LA ASAMBLEA NACIONAL
DECRETA

ARTICULO I. Se denomina Puerto Inabaginya a lo que hoy se denomina Puerto Escocés, en el corregimiento de Tubuala en la Comarca Kuna Yala.

ARTICULO 2. Para los efectos legales todas las instituciones públicas y privadas deben proceder al uso del nombre Puerto Inabaginya y efectuar las modificaciones pertinentes en cada acto, documents, letreros, señales y demás casos de identificación del sitio mencionado, de acuerdo con lo dispuesto en esta ley.

ARTICULO 3. Esta ley entrará en vigencia a partir de su promulgación.

COMUNIQUESE Y CÜMPLASE
Propuesta a la consideración de la Honorable Asamblea Nacional, hoy 30 de marzo de 2010, por el suscrito Honorable Diputado de la Republica Absalón Herrera García.

H.D, ABSAÓN HERRERA GARCIA
Cirquito 10-2

Panama’s National Assembly Law 64, 9th of August 2011

LEY 64
De 9 de agusto de 2011

Que denomina Sukunya Inabaginya a Puerto Escocés

LA ASAMBLEA NACIONAL
DECRETA:

Articulo 1. Se denomina Sukunya Ibanaginya a Puerto Escocés, ubicado en el corregimiento Tubualá, comarca Kuna Yala.

Articulo 2. Las instituciones publicas y privadas deberán reemplazar el nombre Puerto Escocés por Sukunya Inabaginya en letreros, señales y demás casos de identificación del sitio mencionado de acuerdo con lo dispuesto en el articulo anterior e incluir la nueva denominación en los actos o documentos que se emitan.

Articulo 3. Esta Ley comenzará a regir desde su promulgación.

COMUNÍQUESE Y CÚMPLASE.

Proyecto 187 de 2010 aprobado en tercer debate en el Palacio Justo Arosemena, ciudad de Panamá, a los 28 dias del mes de julio del año dos mil once.

El Presidente, Héctor E. Aparicio Diaz

El Secretario General, Wigberto E. Quintero G.

Reverse Engineering the LEGO World Map

2022-02-18T00:00:00+00:00

In June 2021, the LEGO Group released 31203 World Map, a giant 65cm×104cm mosaic consisting of 1×1 round tiles. LEGO has been creating these mosaic sets for a while now, but usually they’ve just been pop-culture mosaics. So I was very happy to finally see a set related to maps, especially something so visually stunning! I recommend reading the review on brickset.com for more information.

Below is a picture of what it looks like, fully constructed.

On the face of it, the design seems fairly simple. Land tiles are in white and the bathymetry (sea depth) is represented using several multicoloured tiles. Dark blue tiles act as shadows for the land tiles to make the image pop.

However, as I was constructing it, I did have a few questions.

How accurate is the land?
How accurate is the bathymetry?
How can I make my own maps?

Here’s a sneak peek of the answer to my third question, which you’ll find at the end of this post.

① Land accuracy

In other words, is there a geographic projection that describes the layout of the white tiles?

Sure it looks like a normal world map, but a few interesting design decisions were made:

Typically the world is centred on the 0° longitude, the Prime Meridian, but in this case the map is centred on Denmark. A reasonable explanation for this is that LEGO wanted to avoid awkwardly chopping the Chukchi Peninsula in two, since it happens to passthrough the Anti-Meridian. But I like to think LEGO just wanted to make Billund, Denmark the centre of the world. 😏🇩🇰
Antarctica is chopped off from the bottom, and there is a lot more arctic ocean than you typically see in a WGS-84 projection. So the latitudes appear to have shifted in weird ways. It’s not clear why they did this, but I can only guess that not-shifting Antarctica would result in a massive white-tiled area at the bottom of the map that most customers wouldn’t find useful. Additionally, increasing the space for sea-tiles makes the map a lot more colourful! 🌈

The animation below shows the transformations I used to convert a WGS-84 projection to the projection used in the LEGO World Map.

In addition to major shifts and transformations, there are also a few other niche design decisions. For instance, Hawaii appears twice as large, the British Isles are larger than usual, and the Gulf of Mexico was made smaller. You can see a comparison of the actual LEGO tiles with my attempted projection below. Click here to view it in full screen.

② Bathymetric accuracy

I also wondered if there was a correlation between the tile colours and the sea depth.

Below is a comparison of the LEGO tiles and a grayscale image of the sea depth, projected using my custom algorithm I made above. (Full screen)

You’ll see some correlation along the mid-ocean ridges, though there are some spots that don’t quite match up. For example, a few ridges don’t appear, like the one between Africa and Antarctica (Southwest Indian Ridge), between Australia/Antarctica/New Zealand (Southeast Indian Ridge), and the Central Indian Ridge.

Next I wondered if there was any direct correlation between the tile colours and exact bathymetry. Below I’ve graphed the proportional frequency of each colour at a particular depth.

The graph shows a general correlation, but it’s not as if the colours have been placed according to an exact formula. Orange, Yellow, and Beige tiles are more common close to sea-level, whereas Cyan, Teal, and Green tiles are more common below 3,500m.

So while it appears that the LEGO designers used the bathymetry as an inspiration, it’s not a strict correlation to any real data. It’s probably better that way for artistic reasons anyway.

In fact, one of the designers left a personal easter egg in the North Pacific using a few green tiles to represent the Chinese character “李”, which is Li, a common Chinese Surname.

③ Creating my own maps!

So LEGO’s World Map is fairly clever, and I appreciate the efforts they made to make something that looks beautiful on a wall. However the World Map is quite impersonal for my taste. I’m not a world traveller, and I’m unlikely to visit that many places around the globe. I would rather want something that’s closer to home.

Creating a custom map by hand is actually pretty hard! Visually approximating where the land tiles should go is tricky. I also wanted something that could generate a map for me automatically. So I set out to write some python scripts!

Step 1: Generating the land

This first step is to convert coastline data into a 1-bit image. I couldn’t find any obvious algorithms to achieve this, but I tried out a few image-processing functions to check whether the results looked good. Below are demonstrations of various algorithms I used. (Full screen)

Neither the threshold filter, nor a dithering filter, produced very good results. Small islands end up disappearing, and coastlines end up being frayed.

I ended up creating my own custom filter, which is essentially a kernel filter. It uses the neighbouring cells to determine whether there is enough contrast to turn a pixel “on” or “off”. There probably is an algorithm out there that does something better than my filter, but I found it works for a lot of situations pretty well. At the very least, if you compare my filter’s results to the original LEGO map it’s hard to tell the difference without looking too closely.

Step 2: Generating the bathymetry

The next step is determining how to layout the coloured tiles.

I eventually came up with an algorithm that basically does the reverse of the proportion chart I showed earlier.

Essentially I go though every pixel in a depth map and assign a random tile colour based on probabilities in the proportion chart. In other words, Orange, Yellow, and Beige tiles will appear more often in pixels close to sea-level, whereas Cyan, Teal, and Green tiles will appear more often at pixels with a depth below 3,500m.

It sounds like a basic probabilities problem, but it’s complicated by the fact that we only have a limited number of tiles. So I have to evenly distribute the proportion of colours in such a way that fairly allocates the tiles across all depths evenly. If one doesn’t, the colours might end up being over-used in certain places on the map.

I’ve illustrated the algorithm below.

My algorithm takes in three pieces of data: The bathymetry, the proportions of coloured tiles, and the actual number of tiles I have. Once it has allocated each tile to a depth, they are then randomly distributed back on the bathymetry map according to depth.

The result of this algorithm can be seen below. (Full screen)

I had to adjust the proportions a bit to get the output to properly highlight certain features like the mid-ocean ridges, otherwise the colours would look a bit noisy. But the neat thing about this algorithm is that it’s fairly flexible to my tastes.

I’ll admit, LEGO’s arrangement of tiles still looks better, especially in the Arctic and North Atlantic sea. Then again, they probably didn’t have a computer generate the tiles for them!

Putting it all together…

Now that I’ve created these scripts, I can easily generate more personal maps. Since I live in northern Europe, I decided to make a map of the North Sea. Below you can see the output of each script. (Full screen)

And below is the final result, mounted on a wall.

But why stop there? I’ve also created a few more maps which I think look pretty interesting. It would take a while to create them all by hand, so all I can offer for now is a digital representation.

Conclusion

I’ve published the source code for this project on Codeberg.org at lego-art-map-generator if you want to check out how the scripts work. But to be honest, the scripts aren’t that easy or intuitive to use… To get good results you do have to tweak the parameters to account for the fact that one has a limited number of tiles in each colour!

But overall I’m quite happy with the results I’ve come up with. And I hope to make it an annual thing where I’ll create a new mosaic using the scripts I’ve made.

Final notes:

The source code for the projection video earlier in this post can be found on Codeberg at lego-art-map-blog-post.

During this project I also came across a bunch of other creative designs and remixes of the World Map set. It’s not quite in the same style as the official LEGO World Map build that I was trying to recreate, but they look great as well!

Sea temperature world map (Peirce quincuncial) by @williamscraigm
Sea temperature world map (Equal Earth) by @mapsoverlord
Height map of Japan (In 3D!) by @nagkaz
Height map of British Isles + Bathymetry World map (Spilhaus Projection) by @kennethfield
Height map of USA by u/Amag140696
Height map of the World by u/Arithmetic_Mustard
Internet Speed data of Europe by u/db0ze
Bionicle/Mata Nui map by @PrinceGalidor

Photogrammetry on Commercial Flights

2021-09-05T00:00:00+00:00

Airplane window seats are great! Not only are they more comfy and easier to take a nap in, but they also have the most quaint form of in-flight entertainment: The outside world!

But other than taking a few photos of holiday mementos and lens-flaring sunsets, what’s the point? Well, I’m here to prove that you can recycle your photos into something vaguely cool using photogrammetry.

For example, see this photo of Edinburgh I took in August 2015:

Using QGIS I can transform this photo onto a map using the ‘georeferencer’ tool. First I mapped several reference points on the photo with identifiable locations on a map of Edinburgh. Then I set the transformation function in the georeferencer settings to be ‘projective’.

After running the transformer, I ended up with a projected image that distorts the photo so that it can be displayed on a world map. You can see the final result by checking out the map below (fullscreen).

Hint: Pan around the map and zoom in to see the transformation up close. Toggle labels using ⓘ to help with identifying features. Toggle 'compare mode' using ◐ to compare the photo with commercial aerial imagery.

Using ‘compare mode’ in the map above you might notice the imagery is slightly warped in different parts of the map. For example, parts of Princes Street in the centre of Edinburgh are misaligned with the real map.

That’s the one downside of using simple projective transformation, which assumes the projected surface is always flat. As the illustration below demonstrates, by using a transformation that assumes a flat surface, the ground surface that is in higher elevation to the projected surface will appear to shift away from the camera and conversely points in lower-elevation will shift towards the camera.

This error becomes more pronounced the closer to the ground the photo is taken. In the example below (fullscreen), notice how the ‘Greendykes Bing’ stretches (see top-right of the photo). The effect is also noticeable with the farmland shifting around to the left of the ‘bing’ where the land dips into a creek.

The other alternative to a ‘projective’ transformation is to use a ‘thin plate spline’, but the distortion effects can only be mitigated by adding a ridiculous number of reference points which can take ages. For this blog post, I’ll be keeping it simple and use the ‘projective’ transformation through all my examples.

Applications

So what are some applications of having this data? I’ve come up with three:

① Open aerial data

One benefit to creating my own imagery data is the freedom of ownership. I, as the individual who took the photo, have the right to apply any copyright license I please. So theoretically I can publish this work into the public domain.

There are only two other ways I know of to get imagery right now that are available to be used publicly, both of which have their own problems.

Satellite imagery in the public domain does exist, such as Landsat 8 and Sentinel-2. But from what I can see, these images have a resolution of ~30 meters. In the photo I took, the midsection of the photo (The centre of the city) has a resolution of ~15 meters. With a better camera setup I could probably get much better results than the casual photo I took.

Drone imagery is also an option. These images are usually taken by consumer drones, and are pretty effective at capturing hyper-local aerial data. Much better quality than what I can achieve through an airplane window!

There are several commercial businesses that do drone photogrammetry, but there are also plenty of hobbyists. The only collective effort I’ve seen of people publicly sharing drone photogrammetry is OpenAerialMap. The neat thing about OpenAerialMap is that all of the imagery is available under a creative-commons public license (CC-BY).

However the issue with flying drones for collecting imagery is often the legal restrictions. For example in the United Kingdom, the Civil Aviation Authority restricts drones from flying anywhere above people, including in buildings or vehicles, with a no-fly-zone extending all the way to the legal height limit. So while drone imagery is easy to get for rural areas, it’s not so useful for cities. In contrast, commercial flights have no problem flying over cities, so it’s possible to capture imagery of urban environments.

So between satellite imagery and hyper-local drone imagery, capturing aerial data from a commercial aircraft is a neat middle ground. 😁

② Amateur surveying

It’s also possible to use the aerial imagery for getting very up-to-date information that can be used for mapping purposes, such as contributing data to OpenStreetMap.org. Depending on the quality of the photo, it might be possible to detect newly built infrastructure like roads and buildings.

For example, I took the photo above (fullscreen) in March 2017. Some of the wind turbines visible in this photo were literally in the process of being constructed when I took the photo. Since it was March, that would have been several months before the yearly aerial imagery for 2017 was collected, which usually is in the late-spring and summer months.

The gradual construction of a wind turbine from start to finish. My photo reveals the turbine being constructed, but the construction equipment is still visible.
(© PDOK Luchtfoto Beeldmateriaal 25cm, 2016 & 2017)

In a lot of countries yearly aerial imagery is very rare. So while my example above is a bit contrived since the Netherlands captures data annually, it could still be useful in other countries.

So aerial data captured on commercial flights has a slight edge to professional aerial data, which is great for amateur mappers who want to get the scoop before the professional surveyors. Of course, you can’t really control what photos you’ll be able to capture because of flight paths and cloud conditions, but it’s still an edge. 😛

③ Historical imagery

Re-projecting a photo can also help with easily comparing historical data.

Time-lapsing pictures captured from the sky can be difficult, but by transforming it to fit on a map, it’s much easier to identify gradual changes to a landscape or city.

For the example below (fullscreen), you can see what Marker Wadden looked like in March, 2017.

For context, below are a sequence of photos that show what Marker Wadden looked like between 2016 and 2017:

Conclusion

Hopefully I’ve convinced you that re-projecting your holiday photos is a neat idea with some cool applications! Or at the very least thought it was mildly interesting.

Of course there are several limitations with taking photos from a plane.

You don’t get to control the flight path, meaning you don’t get to choose what specific landmarks you can photograph.
The weather and lighting is always un-predictable.
It’s difficult to control the camera’s focus.
The plane window might have scratches in the plastic, messing up the photo.
Seat-neighbours probably thinking you are a weirdo for constantly taking pictures, especially during take-off.

…but that doesn’t stop us from trying, right? 😄

I had a bit of fun doing these transformations, so I dug through my photo library for more photos I could georeference. So here are a few more that I thought looked interesting:

References

LandsatLook Viewer – United States Geological Survey, 2021
The Drone and Model Aircraft Code – Civil Aviation Authority, 2021
PDOK Viewer – PDOK, 2021
map-tile-compare – The visualisation tool I made to display the transformed photos for this blog post.

'The Good Place' Map

2021-06-26T00:00:00+00:00

One of my favourite TV shows that I watched last year was The Good Place, an NBC fantasy comedy about the afterlife and moral philosophy.

The show takes place in “Neighborhood 12358W”, a small town within “The Good Place”, that is meant to be a heaven-like utopia for 322 residents who recently passed away on Earth and were sent to The Good Place for being good people. The neighborhood was created by Michael, the afterlife-architect, who precisely designed and calibrated every blade of grass, every ladybug, every detail, for the residents. But when one of the new residents realises they were sent to The Good Place by mistake, things begin to go horribly wrong as the perfect world falls into disarray.

On a recent rewatch I noticed this scene in Season 1, Episode 6 with a map of Neighborhood 12358W in the background. In it, Michael is trying to map out the anomalies to trace the cause of the chaos in the neighborhood.

The map appears only briefly, and is never directly referred to in the story.

I tried looking online whether there was an official picture of the map, but I had no luck.

I also listened to official and unofficial podcasts to see if anyone mentioned the map, but because it is such a short scene it never gets a mention.

I could only find 2 attempts by fans of the show to create a map of The Good Place. One of them was based on a screenshots throughout the show rather than the map itself. The other was similar to the map shown in the episode, but they clearly took creative liberties so it looks very different to the original.

Recreating the map

So eventually this escalated into an obsession for me.

I pieced together any appearances of the map in The Good Place. From what I’ve found, it has appeared in only 2 episodes: S1E6 What We Owe to Each other and S4E7 Help is Other People.

My plan was to use these images to trace the details and recreate the map.

To trace the skewed images from the screenshots in a consistent manner I had to use image reprojection. For me the most convenient way to do this was a combination of QGIS and ImageMagick. I started off with a “base” image which had minimal distortion, but was incredibly blurry. With the base image I then started “georeferencing” more detailed images on to it. The image below illustrates how this works:

I did this with a handful of other images. Below is a GIF that shows a sequence of reprojected images being laid on top of the base image which started out quite blurry. I masked out the characters when they were standing in front of the map, which is why some of the images look a bit weird in shape.

I then imported all of these images into Adobe Illustrator and got to work tracing. I should note this project took me several months to complete because… well, I’m just not a professional illustrator. 😅

But another reason it too so long was because the screenshots themselves were not that focused. A lot of the time the map was simply not in focus of the camera, which meant I wasn’t even sure what I was tracing! More on that later.

Final result

Several Jeremy Bearimies later, I finished the map:

Click here to view the map in higher resolution. Also, quick note at this point, if you want to share the image around the web, please give attribution if you can!

Deep-diving into the map

Now that we can see the image in full view, here’s a list of discoveries that I thought were interesting:

One of the roads on the map is in the shape of a golden spiral, a common motif for representing “perfection”.
The compass doesn’t have the traditional ‘NEWS’ cardinal directions for North, East, West, South. Instead it has the cryptic symbols Y, Q, and X. The northern cardinal directory doesn’t appear to be labelled.
The actual set of The Good Place is in the bottom left corner. That includes the train station and the presentation lawn. You can see the real location in Universal City, California on a map (In case Universal Studios demolishes the set, here’s satellite imagery of what it looked like)
There are four animals in the top right: A bear, a deer, a racoon, and a squirrel. I have a hunch that these animals represent the 4 main characters of the show. I’m guessing the raccoon represents Eleanor Shellstrop because she describes herself as a “Trash bag from Arizona” in S3E1, which could be associated with the colloquial name “trash panda” for raccoons… maybe? And maybe Tahani Al-Jamil is the deer… because she’s tall? Perhaps that’s stretching it…
Frozen yogurt appears on the left side, which in the show is a food item that gets mentioned a lot. For reasons why this is hilarious, you need to watch S2E6.

But not everything is still known about the good place map. I had to make a lot of “educated” guesses:

The scroll on the bottom left of the map is unreadable in the screenshots. So I decided to pull an appropriate quote from S1E1 where Michael is on the presentation lawn introducing the new residents to the good place.
The creature in the ocean on the right of the map was too blurry. I assumed it was a bird, but really it could have been anything, including a whale, seal, or Cthulhu. See for yourself!
The grid references on the sides of the map are completely made up by me. Well, except for Þ and Δ, which were the only symbols I could recognise.
Generally, I’ve made several stylistic decisions that diverge from the original map in the screenshots. Not just because they were blurry, but also because I’m not a professional artist that can replicate someone else’s style. For example, the sea serpent on the bottom right of the map I found difficult to recreate.

Conclusion

Now that I’ve produced this map to the fullest of my ability, I think can finally stop obsessing over it. 😮‍💨

It was fun combining my love of the show and my amateur GIS skills. I also learnt a bit about drawing map illustrations, and getting to grips with Adobe Illustrator (For instance, I’ve learnt that Adobe Illustrator for the desktop is absolute garbage, but I thoroughly enjoyed using the iPad app).

There are still a lot of unanswered questions but it made me appreciate the amazing details the creators of the show put in.

Although if NBC or anyone in the props department were to release pictures of the real map it would totally make my day! 🙏

Final notes:

If you’ve stuck around to read for this long, thank you!
I sincerely believe the usages of copy-rightable material in this post are covered by fair use under United States copyright law. If however the copyright owner would like the images on this site removed, please contact me through any of the social media channels listed in the menu.

Edinburgh's Unbuilt Canals

2019-07-12T00:00:00+00:00

The Union Canal is a canal in Scotland that goes from the Falkirk Wheel all the way to the centre of Edinburgh. The canal terminates at Edinburgh Quay, less than a kilometre away from Edinburgh Castle. These days the canal itself is only used for leisure activities such narrowboats, rowing, and canoes. But the canal also comes with other benefits, such as a towpath that has been converted to a cycle path, and a microcosm for plants and birds providing a much needed greenspace.

Edinburgh Quay (2012), Imagery from Google Earth

Historically the canal was once even closer to the city centre, terminating at the end of Lothian Road. But this was removed in the 1920s, after commercial use of the canal waned.

But what is not as well known are the plans for building canals through the city centre and down to the Leith Dockyards.

The canals to Leith

About 5 years ago I was in a small antique shop on the Royal Mile called Carson Clark Gallery. At the time I was interested in looking for a nice map of Edinburgh for an unrelated project. The owner was rather friendly!

While going through various maps of Edinburgh, he mentioned how the Union Canal was once going to descend with a series of locks down along Lothian road to the Princes Street Gardens. I was slightly skeptical at the time, because it sounds insane to have a canal cut through the centre of the city.

But I was wrong to doubt. Very recently, after browsing through the National Library of Scotland’s digital map gallery, I finally found a map with subtle evidence of these proposals.

This plan of the City of Edinburgh and its environs. - Kirkwood, Robert, fl. 1806-1828 - National Library of Scotland

It was very easy to overlook the canals. The whole map focuses on a variety of proposals, from new streets to new housing developments in New Town. But worming around in the background are a series of lines that bulldoze through various buildings. Thankfully, in one corner, there are three helpful annotations stating what these lines are:

Mr. Stevensons Level line from Port Dundas to Canal Street
Line of canal proposed by Mr. Baird
Line of canal proposed by Mr. Rennie

I’ve digitised the map of the canals below, which displays the 3 proposals, canal locks, and contours (every 10 metres). Click here to view the map in full screen.

The Proposals

Plans for the Union canal started in 1795 by John Rennie, five years after the Forth and Clyde Canal (Glasgow’s own canal system) had opened. The purpose of this new canal was to transfer passengers and also transport minerals such as coal to the city. Almost twenty years later, in 1813, Hugh Baird proposed his own canal to compete with John Rennie’s. Then one year later in 1814, Robert Stevenson also weighed in.

Each proposal took their own interesting route through Edinburgh, which would have dramatically changed the character of the city.

Stevensons’s Proposal

This proposal appears to have been planned with two routes. One that heads directly to Leith, the other running through the centre of Edinburgh. The canal would enter Edinburgh at an elevation of ~50 metres.

Shortly before arriving at Haymarket, the canal would turn North, eventually requiring a series of locks that run parallel with the ① Water of Leith passing what is now called Dean Gardens. The canal would take a straight forward path past Canonmills, Bonnington and ending up in Leith, connecting to one of the three dry docks.

The other route uses a 900 metre long tunnel to connect Haymarket with the Princes Street Gardens, exactly where the railway tunnel exists today. ② Cutting through the gardens it would then ascend to the east of Calton Hill (it’s not clear how, since the slope profile today is quite high!), descend down Easter Road, and ③ cross though Leith Links, and follow the coastline to Leith docks.

Rennie’s Proposal

Rennie’s canal would enter Edinburgh at an elevation of ~85 metres. ① A basin in the middle of Bruntsfield Links provided a staging area for 3 locks to descend into The Meadows. The canal would follow the North Meadow Walk, which would have another basin at the very end. It would then cross Nicolson and St. Leornard’s Street, then ② descend past Holyrood Park using 10 locks (which would have been quite picturesque), ending up at the Royal mile again.

After that, the canal would follow the same path as Stevenson’s Proposal, but rather than ending up in the East of Leith, it would turn towards ③ the Foot of Leith, cross the Water of Leith, ending up in the dockyards to the west.

… and finally Baird’s Proposal

Baird’s canal starts at an elevation of 75 metres. Arriving at the ① south of Lothian Road, it would have a series of locks descending into the Princes Street Gardens. It then takes a very similar route to Stevenson’s canal for a bit, descending Easter Road. ② In the middle of Easter Road several basins would exist. The canal would then head west, crossing the Water of Leith, ③ ending up in the Leith dockyards. The map shows there were many options considered, although it appears the main preference was to take the longer route (Probably would’ve required less demolition!)

So what happened to the proposals?

In a retrospective written in 1825, John Stark states the following estimates for the various proposals.

Canal Proposal	Cost	Cost + Leith Extension
Mr Robert Stevenson	£???	£492,000
Mr Rennie	£330,000	£470,000
Mr Hugh Baird	£240,500	£???

According to The National Archives, £100,000 in the early 1800s was roughly £5,000,000 in today’s currency.

Compared to the other proposals, Mr Baird’s was the cheapest. However, it was not the obvious winner, as the magistrates of Edinburgh were concerned it had “less general utility” and “the more extensive plan would have proved ultimately the most advantageous to the public” (John Stark, p. 66). His plan was debated for 4 years, until 1817, when Baird’s plan was reviewed a second time by Mr Thomas Telford and had his full support.

And so between 1818 and 1822, the Union Canal was built, from Falkirk to Edinburgh.

So what happened to the plan for the canal to go through the city?

Competition from the railways may have been the reason why these plans never went ahead. But it wouldn’t be until the 1840s that the first real railways in Scotland were built. More likely the canal had already achieved its function. Specifically, it had managed to reduce the price of coal by a third, and it efficiently transported manure from the city out to the farms. So it may not have been necessary, or even practical, to expand it further.

It would have been nice to see Hugh Baird’s proposal fully realised. Would Easter road have become a boulevard with a canal and road running parallel? Would the Princess Street Gardens have featured a canal, littered with narrowboats? It’s almost certain the canal would be replaced by the railway by 1846, simply because of how lucrative a railway connecting Waverley to Haymarket would be. But it’s an entertaining thought of what could’ve been.

As for myself, I’m thankful I now have proof of these proposals, and no longer feel like I’m spouting tall tales!

References

Port Hopetoun - Union Canal Unlocked
This plan of the City of Edinburgh and its environs. - Kirkwood, Robert, fl. 1806-1828 - National Library of Scotland
2m LIDAR Composite DSM & DTM for Scotland - Environment Agency, 2019
Picture of Edinburgh: Containing a Description of the City and its environs - John Stark, 1825
Review of the canals at present projected between Edinburgh and Glasgow - Robert Fraser, 1816
Who Made the Scottish Enlightenment?: A Personal, Biographical and Analytical Enquiry - Colin Russell, 2014
Historical Account of the Navigable Rivers, Canals, and Railways of Great Britain As a Reference to Nichols, Priestley & Walker’s New Map of Inland Navigation - Joseph Priestley, 1831
The Victorian Achievement - Impact of Railways - BBC, 2001
Currency Converter - The National Archives

How China distorts their maps

2019-07-05T00:00:00+00:00

I saw this YouTube video a while ago about China’s obfuscated datum called GCJ-02. But I was still curious what the distortion actually looks like overall. I could only find one result on the web, but was not satisfied.

After discovering someone has made a nice python library for this called eviltransform, I quickly put together this script that will render the displacement across China. See the image below!

The direction of the arrows indicates the direction that the coordinate moves when going from the WGS-84 datum to the GCJ-02 datum.

Accuracy

Then I wondered how accurate this eviltransform library really is…

So I sampled some coordinates from Google Maps, which has map data using the GCJ-02 datum, then located the “true” WGS-84 coordinates in OpenStreetMap.

Then I created a script that calculates the distance between my sampled GCJ-02 coordinates and eviltransform’s coordinates. The results of that script is displayed below.

leifgehrmann$ python empirical-data-vs-eviltransform.py
City         My Sample         EvilTransform     Difference
Hefei        564.64 metres     566.31 metres      2.14 metres
Beijing      556.01 metres     555.90 metres      1.78 metres
Chongqing    475.64 metres     479.27 metres      5.15 metres
Fuzhou       591.79 metres     590.93 metres      0.91 metres
Guangzhou    623.50 metres     621.16 metres      2.94 metres
Lanzhou      220.37 metres     219.71 metres      4.16 metres
Nanning      503.55 metres     511.23 metres      8.02 metres
Guiyang      537.07 metres     539.67 metres      2.67 metres
Zhengzhou    581.16 metres     577.00 metres      4.80 metres
Wuhan        591.41 metres     586.37 metres      6.03 metres
Shijiazhuang 539.78 metres     532.51 metres      7.46 metres
Haikou       505.55 metres     509.61 metres      4.07 metres
Harbin       505.84 metres     509.06 metres      3.30 metres
Changsha     658.00 metres     659.92 metres      3.42 metres
Changchun    591.16 metres     586.82 metres      4.80 metres
Nanjing      534.96 metres     541.89 metres      7.85 metres
Nanchang     602.44 metres     606.67 metres      4.49 metres
Shenyang     576.46 metres     577.89 metres      4.74 metres
Hohhot       591.86 metres     589.36 metres      2.52 metres
Yinchuan     390.29 metres     387.54 metres      2.92 metres
Xining       180.53 metres     174.94 metres      6.15 metres
Chengdu      354.21 metres     359.84 metres      7.61 metres
Jinan        531.84 metres     528.25 metres      3.59 metres
Shanghai     473.37 metres     472.91 metres      3.32 metres
Xi'an        465.20 metres     463.65 metres      1.97 metres
Taiyuan      551.91 metres     555.13 metres      7.02 metres
Tianjin      562.76 metres     562.08 metres      4.59 metres
Ürümqi       264.13 metres     264.43 metres      3.57 metres
Lhasa        337.64 metres     335.95 metres      7.82 metres
Kunming      357.32 metres     359.96 metres      3.75 metres
Hangzhou     525.59 metres     522.34 metres      7.45 metres
Ngari        347.17 metres     345.03 metres     11.54 metres
Kashgar      267.57 metres     261.01 metres      6.57 metres
Altay        294.14 metres     292.83 metres      2.76 metres

Since OpenStreetMap data and satellite imagery usually has an error of ~15 metres (because of GPS inaccuracies and orthorectification issues) this means eviltransform is pretty reliable for most common mapping purposes! But perhaps that’s not surprising, since the source code for the algorithm has apparently been leaked according to the Wikipedia article.

The Royal Trees in The Meadows

2019-05-12T00:00:00+00:00

In one corner of The Meadows, one of the large public parks in Edinburgh, stands a sundial pillar. Four metres tall and constructed from various blocks of sandstone, the pillar is inscribed on each side with 8 sayings relating to the passage of time, such as “Well-arranged time is the surest sign of a well-arranged mind”, and “Take heed of time before your time is taken”. Funnily enough the theme of time is relevant for this post!

Next to the pillar are two large Sycamore trees that most would regard as “the usual” park vegetation. But surprisingly, these trees actually have some history. To explain it requires some background of the origin of the sundial pillar.

The sundial pillar in April 2019.

A rather helpful information board next to the pillar explains that the actual name of it is the Prince Albert Victor Sundial Pillar. The pillar was erected in May 1886, to mark the opening of the International Exhibition of Industry, Science and Art. The exhibition was quite a success and managed to attract a total of 2.7 million visitors when it closed 6 months later in October. The brief history of the International Exhibition is studied in more detail in a thesis by George Wilson Smith, and comprehensively documents the organisers, exhibitors, and visitors of the exhibition.

The International Exhibition in The Meadows, with the sundial pillar visible in the bottom left corner – Edinburgh Central Library yT570.1886: Cowan Scrapbook – Source

Ground plan of the International Exhibition
Mc. Lagan & Cumming, Lithrs. Edinr. – Source

Because of Edinburgh Council rules, the exhibition building had to be removed from the park immediately after the event finished.

But the pillar was kept and still stands to this day, although it appears the four sundials, normally on the sides of it, have since been removed. Various other artefacts from the exhibition can still be found around Edinburgh, such as the Brassfounders Column and the Jawbone Arch (The arch is still under restoration since 2014).

The royal memorial trees

While the International Exhibition was being held, four trees were planted next to the pillar. A curiously simple map showing where the trees were planted was created.

Plan of Sundial Pillar and Memorial Trees at West Meadows
Full version on Canmore.org.uk

The image is a bit difficult to read, so I digitized it below.

The first Elm tree was planted by Prince Albert Victor of Wales, on the opening day of the exhibit. Apparently none of the other royals wanted to officiate the opening. “Responsibility instead devolved to the gauche and inexperienced Prince, at twenty-two undertaking his first public duty in Scotland; he nevertheless performed the choreographed observances satisfactorily enough.” (Smith 2015, p. 234)

The second Elm tree was planted “in the name and presence” of Queen Victoria. According to one source, “The Marquis of Lothian stood in for Queen Victoria who was pretty tired after touring the exhibition”. But it may have also been the public mania that ensued when Queen Victoria visited the exhibit, making it very difficult to carefully control the venue surrounding the exhibit. (Smith 2015, p. 237)

To the north and south of the sundial, are two Sycamore trees, both of which were planted by the prince and princess of wales, who in fact were the parents of Prince Albert Victor. 15 years later the prince and princess would become known as King Edward Ⅶ and Queen Alexandra.

So in the end, four trees were planted by royalty! One would therefore think the tree’s would have some kind of plaque or label indicating the mild historical significance, right?

Present day

So what do the trees look like in 2019? Here is a Panorama of the scene.

Click here to view the panaroma in full screen.

Tragically, it appears both of the elms have succumbed to the Dutch elm disease that has plagued Europe over the last half-century (I couldn’t verify whether or not it was the disease, so I’m just speculating because the disease is currently destroying 1000 trees in Edinburgh a year!)

The tree planted by Prince Albert Victor seems to have disappeared. I couldn’t find out when, but the tree is marked on several Ordnance Survey maps from 1895 to the 1950s and vanished from any records I could find after that point.

His tree appears to have been replaced with two Coast Redwood trees, the same species that are renowned for being the worlds tallest in California! They’re only a few metres high so far, but would be interesting to see how they turn out several years from now. They were both planted quite recently in 2013, and so far one of them has grown quite quickly to ~7 metres high!

The tree planted in name of Queen Victoria is quite a recent victim. According to Google Maps historical imagery, it appears the tree was cut in 2010, which is relatively recent. The only evidence of non-arial photography that I could find is this photo by Dianne King in 1999.

Queen Victoria's tree in October 1999, visible in the background behind the pillar – © Dianne King – Full version on Canmore.org.uk

Her tree was replaced sometime between 2013-2015 by an Austrian pine tree. A curious choice, and it makes me wonder if the planters knew about the former significance of the Elm tree. I guess at least the Pine increases the bio-diversity of the park.

The sycamores, planted by the prince and princess of Wales, are still surviving. But none of the trees have any label or signpost to even indicate that any royals planted the trees. Perhaps it’s just to avoid vandalism as it is quite exposed in the park.

A new map

It only makes sense to recreate the map made in 1886. So here is a belated 2019 Edition of the map, with the added enhancements of satellite imagery and tree data.

The carvings inscribed on the sundial pillar about the passing of time are oddly appropriate. “Time and tide wait for no man”. I guess that applies even for trees. So let’s hope the sycamores will still be around for another hundred years.

References

International Exhibition of Industry, Science and Art on Wikipedia
Displaying Edinburgh in 1886: The International Exhibition of Science, Industry, and Art – 2015 Thesis by George Wilson Smith
Friends of the Meadows and Bruntsfield Links - International Exhibition 1886
The City of Edinburgh Council trees dataset - 2019
Ordnance Survey Maps (1895-1950) from old-maps.co.uk, specifically OS Town Plan 1895; OS County Series 1908, 1914, 1931; OS Plan 1947, 1949-1950
David McElroy June 2013 Street view

Creating fonts from SVGs – with automation! 🤖

2019-04-28T00:00:00+00:00

Lately I needed the ability to create a font from an existing set of SVG files that I created in Sketch. I’m not a professional font creator, but I’ve figured out an automated workflow works that works best for me.

My workflow is as follows:

Export the SVGs from Sketch
Convert the SVG’s strokes to paths (Using Inkscape)
Import SVGs into FontForge
Export as a TrueType Font (TTF)

1. Exporting the SVGs from Sketch

How one actually designs the font is anyone’s preference, but I’m quite comfortable with Sketch’s tools. Other people might be more comfortable with Inkscape, or some other vector graphics tool. Sketch has a neat concept called “Artboards” and “Slices” that make it easy to export selections in a single file, rather than having multiple SVG files all over the place on disk. For instance, each glyph in my sketch file is a “Slice”.

Sketch has a nice command line utility called SketchTool that can automate exports like so:

# Locate the SketchTool file
sketch_app_dir=`mdfind kMDItemCFBundleIdentifier == 'com.bohemiancoding.sketch3' | head -n 1`
sketch_tool=$sketch_app_dir/Contents/Resources/sketchtool/bin/sketchtool

# Export the slices in the sketch file as SVG to the folder "svg"
$sketch_tool export slices MyFont.sketch --formats=svg --output=svg/

2. Convering the SVG’s strokes to paths

This step depends on whether your font has strokes/lines instead of paths/polygons. In my case, a lot of the elements in the font are actually line segments. This causes problems later in the process when importing the SVG files into FontForge. See the example below.

I could have manually converted the strokes to paths in Sketch, but I prefer working with outlines for some portions of the font, so I wanted to find an automated way to convert these without losing the ability to change the outline later.

Thankfully, Inkscape has a command line interface that allows me to do this automatically. So I’ve created a shell script called svg-stroke-to-path that can take in a set of SVG files, and convert all strokes to paths.

The script is run like this:

svg-stroke-to-path SameStrokeColor 'stroke="#000"' svg/*.svg

Annoyingly Inkscape does not have a way to select only shapes that have strokes before running the “Stroke To Path” macro. Instead one has to specify a particular stroke colour to select. For my usage that is not a huge problem, since all my strokes will be black (i.e. stroke=#000).

After running my script, all SVGs will now consist only of paths.

3. Importing SVGs into a font editor

I initially tried a variety of font editors for Mac OS, including BirdFont, FontForge, Glyphr Studio, and Glyphs.

I tried BirdFont and Glyphr Studio first since they looked appealing for a novice like myself. However, when I tried to export the font, I got weird glitches. It’s not exactly a “What you see if what you get” experience. Below is an example of the output for BirdFont and Glyphr respectively:

I also tried Glyphs, but I couldn’t figure out how to actually import an SVG. Nor did I want to pay €250 after 30 days for a hobby project… 😬

I found that FontForge was the most robust of the lot, especially for this particular font that I’m creating. Also, FontForge has a command line interface, which allows me to automate this workflow!

Creating a FontForge file

Now to actually create the font file! The first thing after creating a file in FontForge is to modify the font info data.

Confusingly there are 3 different names a font can have. The FontForge documentation wasn’t that helpful for me, but from what I’ve learned:

Fontname is not displayed, but is used internally by PostScript.
Family Name is displayed in the font picker.
Name For Humans is not displayed anywhere.

Next, in the “General” tab, you can specify the dimensions of the font. By default, the em size of the font is 1000 units, with 80% of the height dedicated to the ascent, and 20% dedicated to the descent. This will affect how the SVGs are imported! In my case, I did not need to change the settings as my SVGs were 120px in height, and the glyph was only 100px tall, which meant the baseline was exactly at the 100px line. But if one has a descender that’s greater than 20% of the height of the glyph, one will have to modify these settings. This is illustrated in the image below.

Finally, in the “TTF Names” tab, if you’d like to be a good citizen of Earth and make your font publicly available, be sure to add the SIL Open Font License!

Importing the SVG glyphs

To import an SVG file in FontForge, for every glyph, one has to:

Open the glyph
Select File > Import > Select the file
Select All (CTRL + A)
Select Element > Overlap > Remove Overlap

That’s a lot of work if one needs to do that for over 26 glyphs… 😫

Since FontForge has a command line interface, I created a another shell script called fontforge-svg-importer to import the SVG files into FontForge automatically and repeat the same commands as above.

fontforge-svg-importer MyFont-base.sfd \
  MyFont-generated.sfd \
  svg/*.svg

For each SVG file, the script reads the letter from the filename (e.g. A.svg will be the glyph “A”), import the SVG to the corresponding glyph, then save the result into a new FontForge file called MyFont-generated.sfd.

4. Exporting the font

In FontForge, select File > Export Font. Or, using the automated way, run the following command:

fontforge -lang=py -c\
  'import fontforge;\
  font=fontforge.open(argv[1]);\
  font.generate(argv[2])'\
  MyFont-generated.sfd MyFont.ttf

That command should output a file called MyFont.ttf.

To install the font, just double click on the TTF file and install. Or, if you are on a mac, just do this:

cp MyFont.ttf ~/Library/Fonts

And voilà, the font can now be used.

And that’s it! 🎉

Hopefully this guide was helpful enough for someone who wanted to take a shot at creating their own fonts and who happens to prefer Sketch as a vector shape editor (or any other SVG editor for that matter).

For an example of my automated workflow see my map-fonts repository. To generate the font file, all one has to do is run the command make (assuming all dependencies are installed first of course).

NCN Millennium Mileposts

2019-04-13T00:00:00+00:00

I’ve been living in Edinburgh for a number of years now, but only recently discovered the National Cycle Network’s Millennium Mileposts.

Some background first – Sustrans, a charity organisation for sustainable transportation, started in 1975 as a volunteer organisation to create and improve cycle routes all across the United Kingdom. This resulted in what is now called the National Cycle Network. To celebrate the 20^th anniversary, in 1995 they commissioned artists from the four countries in the UK to design and cast four iron mileposts. Each mileposts is nicknamed after the artists.

Mills (🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿), also called The Fossil Tree, displays a variety of fossilised creatures, with a hint at the very top of the milepost of humanity’s usage of fossil fuels (and also suggesting that we might reach peak-oil)
Rowe (🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿), which is my favourite, looks like a chain but may also represent a Lovespoon.
McColl (🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿) takes a more abstract shape, inspired by Joan Miro’s La fourche and Branusci’s The Cock.
Dudgeon (Northern Ireland), also called Tracks, shows the tyre tracks made in the landscape by cyclists. The bottom half includes a poem by Dudgeon himself.

There’s a Wikipedia article which has a tiny bit more information on this. But it appears knowledge on this topic is scattered around the web. Not surprising, considering this happened in the 90s.

These mileposts are incredible easy to cycle past without noticing, but any cyclist in the United Kingdom will have almost certainly come across one at some point.

I only recently discovered these mileposts because the one I noticed was painted with a rather striking blue colour. This Mills milepost sits in Colinton, just to the west of Spylaw Park.

Mileposts in the United Kingdom

According to the plaques on these mileposts, there are 1000 of them in the UK. However, this figure probably isn’t true anymore. An ad-hoc register of all the mileposts in the UK can be found on the OpenStreetMap Wiki, but this list is growing more outdated over time, as mileposts are being removed or relocated. It appears even Sustrans themselves don’t know for sure where all the mileposts are located anymore. According to the Wiki, there are roughly 950 mileposts in total.

The only public dataset of all the mileposts appears to be in OpenStreetMap. As of April 2019, 524 mileposts have been recorded, so it’s more than half complete. (Update: 839 mileposts as of February 2021). The map might be quite sparse in some areas, as this is all crowdsourced. I plotted this dataset in the map below.

Millennium Milepost data: © OpenStreetMap contributors (Overpass query); Coastline and lake data: NaturalEarthData.com; Rendered using Map-engraver (source code);

Mills and Rowe mileposts seem to be the most common. McColl shows up in some cities, but otherwise quite difficult to find. Dudgeon is the rarest of all, with only 3 in the whole of Scotland.

Mileposts in Edinburgh

In total, Edinburgh has a total of 15 mileposts, with another 3 close-by in Queensferry.

Below is a collage of 12 of mileposts that i’ve found so far. A few of these seem to have recently been painted over, so some people seem to be actively involved in maintaining these mileposts!

Disappointingly, to find the nearest Dudgeon type milepost, I need to go all the way to Coatbridge or Caldercruix, which would be a 100km ride for me. Maybe someday when I can be bothered…

Updating OpenStreetMap

Fortunately, most of the mileposts in Edinburgh appear to be correctly added in OpenStreetMap. But there were two mileposts which had a few issues.

The milepost in Colinton (the one pictured at the very beginning) has been moved 100 metres away from its original location. So that was an easy fix to add to OpenStreetMap.

According to OpenStreetMap there also should be a milepost hidden somewhere in Waverley Station. I tried having a look for 15 minutes, but couldn’t find it. I would’ve snooped around a bit more, but acting suspicious near a train station isn’t a brilliant idea. It might be located near a bike stand, however it is also possible that it’s lying around in some storage facility after some recent renovations. It was last seen January 2016.

I’ve created a python script to list inconsistencies between OpenStreetMap data, and data on the OpenStreetMap Wiki. There are a few obvious errors, which I intend to fix later. Update: I’ve gone one step further and created a website that shows all the results!

A hidden challenge

Every milepost also contains a curious disk with a series of symbols. Below is a small sample of the disks found on the mileposts I discovered.

These are all part of something called the Millennium Time Trails, and there’s even a whole website called Secrets of the MTT that provides some documentation.

It’s essentially a massive puzzle, which requires some code-breaking skills that go way over my head. The symbols on these disks aren’t the puzzle. The challenging part is trying to determine the order and orientation of the symbols. According to the website, to complete the puzzle I need to collect 50 different disks. And they all have to be unique.

The Wikipedia article on the National Cycle Network spoils the puzzle anyway, but maybe I can figure the puzzle out for myself in the future.

Conclusion

Hunting down the mileposts has been fun and interesting, and hope to continue if ever there’s an opportunity. I’m still amazed I’ve never noticed these before, since I’ve regularly cycled and walked past some of these mileposts. I’ve just never thought to stop and read. As the saying goes, “Always Read the Plaque”.

Update 2019-06-23: A new McColl milepost has appeared on George IV Bridge, next to the National Museum of Scotland! It has been added to OpenStreetMap.

Update 2021-02-27: A lot has changed since 2019. Sustrans has released a KML file which appears to be data from February 2020 which contains some information where the rest of mileposts might be located. Someone has kindly mapped this on umap for those interested in viewing it in a browser. Presumably because of this file, this has increased the number of mapped mileposts from 500 to 800. It’s not clear whether these mileposts have been surveyed, but it doesn’t look like they were imported into OSM.

I’ve updated the map and stats on this page to reflect this update. I’ve also created a website that can help with the validation of data in OSM.