Interpreting Our World: 100 Discoveries That Revolutionized Geography

Determining absolute location on the Earth’s surface is critical to the study of geography, in order to locate places, events, and phenomena, uncover spatial relationships, and create maps. Determining one’s latitude gradually improved over the centuries with a series of devices such as the cross-staff and the sextant, used to measure the angle of the sun and stars in the sky (see Cross-Staffs, Astrolabes, and Other Devices). However, by the 18th century, determining one’s longitude remained elusive, and given expanding global exploration and trade, it was becoming an urgent global problem. A single naval disaster off the Isles of Scilly in 1707, for example, cost Britain’s Royal Navy four warships and nearly 2,000 sailors’ lives. In addition, the standard practice of sailing to a desired latitude and then sailing due east or west, instead of the more direct Great Circle route, was wasting time and money for the world’s navies and merchant fleets, and the countries and companies that supported them.

Shipwrecks and inefficiency prompted the British Parliament to pass the Longitude Act in 1714. The Act established a Board of Longitude and offered monetary rewards (initially £20,000, or £2.81 million in today’s currency) for those who figured out a simple, practical method to determine a ship’s location to within half of one degree of longitude. Other efforts and prizes were in the offing in France and the Netherlands.

Since the Earth rotates at 360° per day, or 15° per hour, there is a direct relationship between time and longitude. If someone on a ship knew a distant reference time and could compare it to the local time on the ship, these two times could be compared, and the longitude could be computed. Determining local time was fairly straightforward, particularly on sunny days or clear nights, but determining the distant reference time was difficult. In part because of this, and in part due to the long history of astronomical observations by the scientific community harkening back to Ptolemy and Eratosthenes’s day, with subsequent work by Werner, Galileo, and Halley, astronomers believed they could determine longitude based on the positions of stars and planets. Astronomers held that pendulum clocks were too unreliable at sea on a ship that pitched and rolled with the waves. Scientists such as Newton and Huygens favored a lunar calculation method, but this proved challenging; early trials involved four hours of effort, required clear days and nights, and were notoriously inaccurate. Still, the lunar calculation method was widely used through much of the 18th century.

Cabinetmaker and clockmaker John Harrison (1693–1776) proposed that a mechanical timepiece, one that could be brought aboard a ship, could maintain the correct time at a reference location. In fact, he devoted his life to pursuing the study of time, or horology. Harrison built five clocks over his lifetime, named H-1 through H-5. Why was it a lifetime pursuit? First, Harrison was a perfectionist, continually refining his work, and like the evolution in electronics during the 20th century that resulted in ever-smaller components, each of Harrison’s clocks was smaller and more accurate than the one before it. H-1 was nearly one meter tall; H-5 was pocket-sized. Even his first two chronometers of 1735 and 1739 gained only one second each day. Second, the Board of Longitude, heavily influenced by the astronomy research community that had been established decades before at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, kept increasing its demands of Harrison. They likely were jealous of Harrison as well, as he was a self-educated man and outside the “establishment.”

Harrison was born in West Yorkshire, England, and began his work life by entering his father’s trade of carpentry. At the age of six, he suffered an attack of smallpox, which may have been decisive in more than one way in shaping his life: During his long period of convalescence, Smith became fascinated by a watch that his parents, who were seeking to amuse him, had laid on his pillow. Apparently, he never forgot that watch. As part of his trade, he built his first longcase clock out of wood at age 20. Harrison was 21 years old when Parliament announced the “longitude prize.” Once fixed on the longitude problem, he faced the challenge of making a clock that not only could withstand a ship’s pitching and rolling but also could endure variations in temperature, pressure, and humidity and avoid becoming corroded in salty air. After five years, Harrison finally built a sea clock that was deemed worthy of a trial by the Board. He abandoned the second clock after noting a design flaw, and it took him 17 years to build the third. The problem with the first three clocks was that their balance wheels were large, which meant they vibrated too slowly to make the timepieces stable. Around 1750, Harrison discarded his “sea clock” idea and realized that he would have greater success building a clock the size of a watch. A watch-sized timekeeper would use a smaller balance that oscillated at a much higher speed. Another benefit was that a small timepiece would be much more practical.

His subsequent watch, requiring six years of work, was the first to compensate for changes in temperature. He also designed and built into it the first “going fuse,” allowing the watch to run continuously even as it was being wound. His H-4, completed in 1759, resembled an oversized pocket watch at 5.1 inches (13 cm) in diameter. It incorporated the innovative and difficult use of diamond, with vibrations controlled by a flat spiral steel spring, and a seconds motion with a sweep seconds hand, running at five beats (ticks) per second.

All clocks and watches tend to run more slowly when the temperature rises. Among Harrison’s inventions was a compensated pendulum, which used brass and steel wires in a grid to help the clock keep time even with temperature variations. Additionally, he devised a way for clocks to run without oil. In the 18th century, animal fat was used in clock oil, and this would often deteriorate into a glue-like substance. Harrison’s design used bearings with rolling instead of sliding contact, and since there was no friction, there was no need to use the problematic oil. Furthermore, Harrison was revolutionary for his adoption of watches for his later timepieces, because during his time in history, watches were dismissed as trivial pieces of jewelry.

Harrison was still testing his first “sea watch” when he began working on the second (the H-5). Because he felt “extremely ill-used by the gentlemen who I might have expected better treatment from” (Sobel 1995), he enlisted King George III to assist him. The king tested the watch for 10 weeks in 1772, making observations daily and eventually finding the watch to be accurate to within one-third of one second per day. The king was able to persuade Harrison to appeal to Parliament for the full amount of the price, and he even threatened to chastise them himself if Harrison did not try. At long last, in 1773, Harrison received a monetary award from Parliament for his achievements at the age of 80, and he was finally recognized for solving the longitude problem.

Although the cost of chronometers remained high during the following 50 years, they became increasingly common after the price dropped. Harrison’s revolutionary influence on geography only increased over the following decades and centuries and cannot be underestimated: It was felt through increased volume and scale of exploration and trade, from ships that were now much more confident in their location. This in turn had a profound impact on land use, urbanization, migration, culture, language, and much more, from the local to the global scale (see Supply Chain Management; Urbanization).

Harrison was finally vindicated at the end of his life, but furthermore, respect for him grew after his death. During the early 20th century, retired naval officer Rupert Gould restored Harrison’s original timepieces and ensured that they were housed in the Royal Observatory. Dava Sobel’s book Longitude became the first popular bestseller on horology. The Illustrated Longitude, published in 1998, contains 180 images selected by William J. H. Andrewes. After the book was dramatized for television, Harrison’s story was suddenly widely known. Still more vindication was to come. One of Harrison’s more controversial claims during his later years is that he had built the most accurate land clock. This clock, tested during 2015 at Greenwich, showed that it kept time to within one second over one hundred days, and it was awarded a prize in the Guinness Book of World Records, further vindicating Harrison.

During the late 20th century, an American, the honored guest at a dinner at the prime minister’s house in London, proposed a toast to John Harrison. The man praised Harrison’s invention, noting that it enabled explorers to chart Earth with precision. He said that the invention also allowed for a navigation system to enable voyages to the moon, once most of the Earth had been explored. “You, ladies and gentlemen, started us on our trip” (Wilford 2001). The speaker was astronaut Neil A. Armstrong.

See also: Cross-Staffs, Astrolabes, and Other Devices; Supply Chain Management

HAYDEN, POWELL, AND WHEELER SURVEYS

Systematic Exploring and Mapping

The success of the Lewis and Clark expedition made it clear that government-sponsored expeditions were worthwhile if the mission was clear and the right persons were chosen to lead them (see Lewis and Clark). The expedition also made it clear that a vast amount of United States territory remained unexplored, particularly as further territory was added following the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. Furthermore, the Industrial Revolution was making it obvious that natural resources were key to the expansion of any nation’s economy, and to discover those natural resources meant developing geologic, topographic, and hydrologic maps. Not the least of these concerns was to find the best routes for the expanding railroad network. With the Civil War over, by the latter part of the 1860s, the U.S. government was ready to sponsor additional expeditions to survey, study, and map the land and its natural resources.

American naturalist John Wesley Powell led the Geographic Expedition of 1869. The expedition was the first time a thorough cartographic and scientific rendering of the Green River and Colorado River in the southwest United States was made. Ten explorers began a three-month expedition at Green River Station, Wyoming Territory, traveling downstream through present-day Colorado, Utah, and Arizona before they reached the confluence of the Colorado and Virgin rivers in Nevada. The group met its goal, though not without consequences: It lost boats and supplies, experienced many near-drownings, and faced unexpected departures and desertions of several group members. Despite these setbacks, they were able to produce the very first detailed descriptions of the canyon country of the Colorado Plateau, a key goal of the expedition. Powell retraced part of his 1869 route during the winter of 1871–72. His 1875 and 1895 detailed accounts of the expeditions greatly expanded interest in and settlement of the region.

Powell purchased four freight boats that measured 21 feet long and four feet wide (6.4 m by 1.21 m). Three boats were sturdy, with additional storage space. They were able to hold close to 7,000 pounds of food and supplies, which would last 10 months. The fourth boat, named the Emma Dean, was smaller and lighter, made of pine, and 16 feet (4.9 m) long, and it was Powell’s own personal boat, designed specifically for him. During his service as a Union major in the Civil War, Powell lost his right arm when he was hit with a musket ball at the Battle of Shiloh in 1862. The Emma Dean had a special strap that Powell held with his left hand, which helped him to keep his balance when he was on deck. Each boat was rowed by other members of the team, while Powell and Howland—the official cartographer of the expedition—did not have to row.

Early in the expedition, on the Green River, one of their freight boats and many supplies were lost, at a place aptly called Disaster Falls. Fortunately, Powell recovered some of the barometers, essential for determining altitude for creating topographic maps. Six of the 10 men completed the entire journey; one left and lived among the Paiutes; three hiked out and were never seen again. After a harrowing journey through Glen Canyon and Grand Canyon, on August 30, Powell and the rest of the crew safely arrived at the Mormon settlement of Callville.

The Hayden Geological Survey of 1871 was not the first expedition for geologist Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden—it was his fifth—but it was the first that was federally funded, to the sum of $40,000. The survey began on June 8, departing Ogden, Utah, traveling through Idaho Falls into Montana and then southwest up the Yellowstone River, reaching Yellowstone Lake on July 28. One of Hayden’s early reports to the assistant secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, Dr. Spencer Baird, said, “We found everything in the Geyser region even more wonderful than it has been represented” (Hayden 1880). While they were camped at Steamboat Point, two large earthquakes struck, and by the time they departed the area, they had taken 400 photographic negatives.

James Stevenson, the survey manager and director, determined the route along with the wagon master, Stephan Hovey. In open country, Hayden’s group was able to average 15 miles a day. After marching for several days, they would typically camp for several days to resupply, to process their findings, and to meticulously prepare samples to ship to the Smithsonian Institution. While they were camping and while they were moving forward, small teams of scientists, photographers, and topographers would venture from the group to collect specimens and observe and document the fauna, flora, geography, and geology of the lands they encountered. The expedition also sent out hunters to sustain the party with food. Having good weather the entire time, the survey was finished by the first of October, when it disbanded.

Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon

Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon (1865–1958) served as a Brazilian military officer, explorer, and supporter of the rights of indigenous populations. As with the Hayden, Powell, Wheeler, and other surveys, many of Rondon’s discoveries occurred during or as a result of his extensive surveys of territories that were previously undocumented and unmapped. Many of these early surveys’ missions were to lay telegraph line, and Rondon laid over 4,000 miles (6,437 km) of lines in his lifetime. In 1914 he traveled a second time to the River of Doubt, this time with Theodore Roosevelt, on a mission fraught with peril. He supported the creation of the first Brazilian national park for indigenous people along the Xingu River in 1961, and the state of Rondônia in Brazil is named after him.

The third survey, the Wheeler Survey, focused on the United States west of the 100th meridian, a line that runs through the west central Great Plains. Comprising multiple expeditions, it was supervised by George Montague Wheeler and included Montgomery Macomb. After Wheeler had led expeditions from 1869 to 1871, in 1872 the U.S. Congress authorized another ambitious plan: to sponsor a survey that would map the portion of the United States west of the 100th meridian at a scale of eight miles to the inch, or at approximately 1:500,000. The team was tasked with carrying out mapping and documenting the physical and cultural geography of the region, including observations of the American Indians they encountered. Additionally, they were to select potential military installation sites, explore the possibilities for creating roads and railroads, and take note of the agricultural potential, including vegetation, minerals, climate, and water sources. Why were these surveys revolutionary for geographic knowledge and the geographic perspective? The Hayden survey in particular was instrumental in persuading the U.S. Congress to pass the necessary legislation needed to create the world’s first national park, Yellowstone. In 1894, the first Yellowstone park superintendent, Nathaniel P. Langford, wrote this about the Hayden expedition: “We trace the creation of the park from the Folsom-Cook expedition of 1869 to the Washburn expedition of 1870, and thence to the Hayden expedition (U.S. Geological Survey) of 1871 . . . [we] owe the legislation which set apart this ‘pleasuring-ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people’”(Langford 1904). Hayden brought along photographer William Henry Jackson and artist Thomas Moran, who served as the 19th-century version of a public relations department. That Hayden knew how powerful the photographs and drawings would be was evident in one of his letters to the U.S. Congress: “Mr. Jackson made the most abundant pictures. Mr. Moran was filled with enthusiasm and has returned to devote himself to the painting of pictures of the Yellow Stone [sic] region. . . . I am sorry that you were not able to see the wonderful things in the Yellow Stone but when reports come before the world, you will get a pretty clear conception of them” (Hayden 1880). All three surveys provided seeds for the later environmental movement and the notion that some of these lands should be set aside, or protected (see Environmental Movement; see Land Protection).

These surveys also were revolutionary because they brought together some of the most talented and experienced people from a variety of professions, including explorers, engineers, topographers, soil scientists, geologists, climatologists, surveyors, mineralogists, botanists, entomologists, and biologists. This model would prove so successful that it inspired governments around the world to create federal agencies of geography, mapping, geology, biology, oceanography, and other disciplines. This movement began when the surveys of Hayden, King, Powell, and Wheeler were merged to form the U.S. Geological Survey. The USGS was created as an amendment to an act of Congress on March 3, 1979, prompted by a report from the National Academy of Sciences. The USGS’s responsibilities included classifying public lands and examining the geology, mineral resources, and products of national domain. Clarence King, the agency’s first director, was succeeded by none other than John Wesley Powell.

Like others in this book whose explorations revolutionized geographic knowledge, these explorers were no strangers to the landscape. Powell, for example, spent his childhood days rafting the Mississippi River and its tributaries, and he was a professor of geology at the Illinois State Normal University and a curator of the Illinois Museum of Natural History. All three expeditions’ members had considerable wilderness experience; many were veterans of the Civil War. Only a few were paid for their participation; most had joined for the love of adventure; this book shows that this was true for other voyages. Those who were paid certainly would not get rich: Powell’s paid crew members were reimbursed $25 per person each month for using scientific instruments and for making maps. Camp cook Billy Hawkins was paid $1.50 per day for his services.

The three expeditions were much shorter in duration and covered more territory than had Lewis and Clark in 1803, indicating the settlement and expanding railroad network that had taken place during the intervening 70 years. For example, Powell began at Green River, Wyoming, a location that was convenient because of its location on the Transcontinental Railroad. The newly completed railroad in Utah Territory would allow Powell an easy way to ship the four boats for his expedition directly from Chicago to the starting point of the expedition.

Last but not least, the expeditions were the first recorded trips into much of the terra incognita of the western United States. Powell and his party, for example, made the first recorded passage by European descendants through the entirety of the Grand Canyon—all with Powell only having the use of only one arm. With them, the world’s knowledge of physical and cultural geography greatly expanded, but equally importantly, the methods by which this knowledge was gathered became more systematic and organized.

See also: Environmental Movement; Land Protection; Lewis and Clark

HENRY THE NAVIGATOR

Winds, Seas, and Ships

Around the same time as the portolan charts went from showing only selected harbors to including more of the surrounding coastlines, and even venturing out into the open oceans, Prince Henry of Portugal (1394–1460), known as Prince Henry the Navigator, made his mark as causing a revolution in geography. What revolutionary moments did he create?

First, he may have established the world’s first navigation school—at Sagres near Cabo de São, Portugal. It is traditionally held that the school employed cartographers, including Portolan chart-makers, to develop new maps based on data collected during expeditions sponsored by Prince Henry. Why the “may” in the preceding sentence? Many modern historians do not believe that there was an actual school or a technical base or observatory for exploration, although Henry did employ cartographers. Why, then, is Henry included in the list of revolutionary moments?

Prince Henry the Navigator (1394–1460), through his own voyages but especially through financing and supporting the voyages of other Portuguese ships, greatly expanded European knowledge of Africa and the Atlantic Ocean for the first time. Equally revolutionary moments associated with him are understanding of the trade winds and the development of a lighter ship, the caravel. (Coplandj/Dreamstime.com)

Whether or not he established the school, the revolution that he helped foster was partly due to his role in the expansion of the lands explored by Europeans—in his case, by the nation of Portugal. However, in larger part, the true revolution that he helped foster was that during his time, Portuguese navigators discovered and refined the North Atlantic Ocean’s volta do mar, meaning “turn of the sea” or “return from the sea.” This was the understanding of the trade winds, which was to have global implications for the succeeding centuries of sailing, and indeed to the present day. Understanding trade winds during his time enabled sailors to sail upwind after fairly easy navigation to the south and southwest, and thus return to Portugal. No longer did the ocean hold the same fear that it held in the past—that sailing into it, a ship and its crew might never return. Knowing the trade winds, pilots had to really go out on a limb, sailing in a direction that went counter to everything they believed in—in the wrong direction, actually—far to the west, away from Portugal, to an area near the Azores islands. Once there, they could then sail east, following the trade winds.

This technique proved to be extremely helpful for all those who followed, including Columbus, Balboa, and Magellan. Therefore, Henry’s regional explorers paved the way for truly global expeditions—indeed a revolution. And these global expeditions changed the cultural geography by spreading plants and animals—and diseases—into areas that had previously been isolated from each other and from the outside simply because of their physical location. The ships became the vectors—the change agents—and the world would never be the same again.

Who was Prince Henry the Navigator? First, was Henry the Navigator his real name? No, his real name was actually Infante Dom Henrique de Avis, Duke of Viseu. Apparently, no one called him “Navigator” during his lifetime, but the term was coined by Schaefer and de Veer, two German historians working in the 1800s, and popularized by British authors of his biography later on in the 1800s. Too bad: Henry probably would have liked to be called “Navigator”—a suitably geographical name! Henry was, first and foremost, a politician, but through his administration, he was in a position to usher in what would become known as the Age of Discovery. Second, was he actually a prince? Yes, he was, because he was the fifth child of King John I of Portugal. Third, did he actually navigate and sail himself, or just enable others to do so? While most of his influence came from enabling others to sail and explore, he certainly did some of his own, which has been documented, beginning with a voyage to North Africa at a young age, as we shall see.

At age 21, he, along with his father and brothers—and yes, along with a small army which did help matters—conquered Ceuta in northern Morocco, the port held by the Moors on the North African coast. In part he wanted to conquer it to evict the Barbary pirates. The Barbary Coast was an area of the Berbers, on the south side of the Mediterranean Sea, from Morocco on the west, to Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya on the east. These pirates raided Portuguese coastal villages for the purpose of selling people into the slave trade. But Henry also conquered Ceuta to open up trade and exploration with Africa. During this and other missions, he quickly found the Portuguese ships to be slow and heavy for the longer voyages he had envisioned, so he directed that a smaller, lighter ship be developed: the caravel. The caravel could travel largely independent of the prevailing wind. With it, suddenly Henry and the Portuguese found a vast territory that could be explored from their strategic location of Portugal at the western end of the Iberian Peninsula.

Henry was innovative in enabling others to help meet his own goals—his brother Peter, for example, toured Europe and secured a world map drafted by a cartographer from Venice. His brother Edward became king of Portugal upon John’s death. Edward granted to Henry profits from trading areas that Henry had discovered, and he gave him the sole right to authorize expeditions beyond Cape Bojador in Western Sahara. This cape, until Henry’s time, had been the most southerly point known to Europeans. In 1444, Dinis Dias passed the Senegal River and rounded the peninsula of Cap-Vert. This and other voyages represented over 1,500 miles (2,414 km) of coastline explored during Henry’s time.

With their new coastal explorations, the Portuguese had now passed the Sahara Desert, and thus their explorers and traders could circumvent the Muslim land-based trade routes in the desert and set up their own. Like others of his day, Henry took 20 percent in tax from everything brought back on the voyages, which he used in part to fund research and additional voyages. Henry was also revolutionary in that with these funds, the first private mercantile expeditions began; for example, 40 vessels sailed in the two-year span from 1444 to 1446. The Portuguese were able to make incursions on the Italian monopoly on red pepper, and thus the first inklings of the wars for the spice trade began. On a grimmer note, the Portuguese obtained slaves through raids in Africa, providing labor for their first stirrings of being a colonial power. Helping matters were edicts from the popes in Rome of the time, granting the Portuguese the sole rights to exploration, commerce, and conquest.

Most of the voyages sailed from Lagos, Portugal, near Henry’s home at Sagres. With the new gold coming in from conquered lands and people, Portugal could begin minting its first gold cruzado coins. Just before Henry died, Cadamosto became the first European to reach the Cape Verde Islands. By 1462, two years after Henry’s death, the Portuguese had explored the African coast as far as Sierra Leone at 8 degrees North latitude. By 1490, Dias reached the Cape of Good Hope, and eight years later, Vasco da Gama sailed all the way to India. Thus, the world known to Europeans expanded immeasurably; it wouldn’t be long before the dragons and sea monsters began to disappear from oceans and lands on world maps. The world began to be understood as never before—not just where things were, but also landforms, rivers, peoples, cultures, wind and ocean currents, and more.

Expeditions under Henry’s sponsorship rediscovered the Madeira Islands, explored as far south as The Gambia on the west coast of Africa, and promoted the colonization of the Azores. Competition was already heating up; part of the Portuguese desire to settle the Azores and the Madeira Islands likely was because of Spain’s efforts to claim the Canary Islands. Colonization of all of these islands, as well as Cape Verde, was very important to Spanish and Portuguese exploration and domination of northwest Africa and North and South America. They provided, due to their strategic location southwest of Spain and Portugal, bases for voyages to the New World for Columbus, Magellan, and many others. They also provided a staging area for practices that would be used in American colonization, and they brought in returns on capital loans extended by Prince Henry to the settlers of the islands.

Much about Henry is obscure, but the picture that emerges is that he was a pious man of extraordinary intellect, though influenced by astrological predictions, a “science” that in his time was not separated from formal religion. Henry lived at a time and place when and where the world was just beginning to change in profound ways. At that time and place, Henry showed that being a political figure as well as being an explorer was highly advantageous. Few other geographic revolutionaries can say the same.

See also: Columbus, Christopher; Magellan, Ferdinand

HERODOTUS

Documenting The Histories: The Diversity and Unity of Humankind

Herodotus (ca. 484–424 BCE) is known as the “Father of History,” and his major work is known simply as The Histories. Both of these titles may seem a bit pretentious, yet consider the following: The Histories is the very first surviving work of history, and its breath and depth were so revolutionary that it expanded what was known of hundreds of years of historical events. It expanded what was known of regions and people for millions of square kilometers, from India on the east to Spain on the west, and from Germany on the north to Egypt on the south. The Histories also influenced how people began to consider the way thoughtful and rigorous research should be conducted, for more than 2,000 years after its publication.

Why are the writings of someone known as the “Father of History” so revolutionary to geography? It is in part because history and geography have long been intertwined. Most geographers, and many historians, would assert that it is impossible to fully understand the causes and implications of historical events without understanding the places in which they occurred. In other words, the chronology cannot be separated from the chorology. Most history scholars teach and conduct research using maps. Indeed, it is difficult to teach history without some maps illustrating movements of people, languages, and ideas, and illustrating important events, such as battles, explorations, and natural disasters that altered the course of history. However, to teach and research history fully and effectively means more than using maps to indicate location; it means to think geographically, spatially, and holistically about the whys of where—the integration of history and geography. All history is influenced by the physical and cultural geography of the place and region in which it occurred (see Strabo). All cultural geography is influenced by the historical events that shaped it in the past and continues to shape it today.

Herodotus seemed to understand the intertwining of history and geography quite well. Specialization—and the associated separation of branches of learning into disciplines, fields of study, and degree programs, along with the subdivision of disciplines into subdisciplines—in the past 200 years has led to a vast increase in the amount and depth of research. Some scholars have considered that it has also led to a decline in holistic thinking. Geography, too, includes subdisciplines with a diversity of thousands of scales and topics ranging from soils, to the politics of flood mitigation, to historical business tenant occupancy in a community, to seasonal cycles of bird migration. However, geography has always been a holistic discipline. Despite the many specializations within it, one of its chief contributions to scholarship is its emphasis on examining the “big picture” and connections. So it is with The Histories—it delved into such details as events, landforms, trade, and climates, but it also stepped back and offered a larger, encompassing view. Written in the Ionic dialect of classical Greek, the writings contain one of the first accounts of the rise of the Persian Empire and the causes and events of the Greco-Persian Wars. At some point, The Histories was divided into nine books, named after the Greek Muses—the goddesses of inspiration for literature, science, and the arts. Centuries later, The Histories was translated into Latin, and it has been studied intensely ever since.

Herodotus’s account of the ancient world of the fifth century BCE was revolutionary to history and to geography. His work serves as an influential account of physical geography, cultural geography, history, and anthropology. His extensive use of facts and descriptions, scholarly methods, and ability to tell stories make Herodotus’s work a geographic revolution. (Library of Congress)

The writings of Herodotus were also important to geography because they are place-based, detailing the cultural and physical geography and events of the known world. Herodotus described the world as consisting of three landmasses—Asia, Europe, and Africa (which he referred to as Libya). While he did not know about the British Isles or Scandinavia, or anything in Asia east of India, his shorelines in many places match their true shapes, not just in the Mediterranean, but even in the Arabian Peninsula, the Black Sea, and the Caspian Sea. Unlike some other Greek thinkers, Herodotus did not think the landmasses formed a circle; he believed they formed a rectangle, with longer distances from east to west than from north to south. He had heard that it was possible to circumnavigate Africa, but he thought the southern tip of Africa was fairly close in latitude to Aden, on the southern end of the Red Sea. The Nile River, according to Herodotus, began in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco, flowing south and east before it turned north to flow through Egypt. He described not only large landmasses and regions, but also trade between inhabitants of different valleys and land use practices by certain peoples. In short, he also investigated and reported on a detailed scale, one of regions and communities.

Furthermore, Herodotus was revolutionary to the understanding of what geography is and what the study of it should be, because he believed it was important to gather primary information about what he was writing. In other words, he actually visited many of the places he described, in an age when travel by land and sea was uncertain, slow, and fraught with danger. He visited the settlements around his homeland of what is now Turkey, and also settlements in nearby Greece, but he also traveled south and west to southern Italy, east to Babylonia, northeast to the Black Sea, and south to Egypt. Herodotus also gathered information from secondary sources: the people he met and interviewed. He seemed to understand the difference between primary and secondary sources and included both in his works. Much of what he wrote proved to be amazingly accurate and is the most detailed picture of the world of the time that has survived to this day. Indeed, the Greek word historiê, which Herodotus used to describe his work, means “inquiry” rather than “record of past events.” Sometimes he recorded the accounts that different sources gave, rather than his own opinion.

The works of Herodotus were widely read by scholars in Greek and Roman times, and then through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. They were the earliest example of writing not just about the locations of places but also about what the places were like, and thus they formed the basis of the focus of geography. The writings encouraged the idea that geography is not simply the location of places but also the character of places—their history, their culture, and the sense of place that they foster. His work encouraged the study of not only geography, but history and other disciplines as well, for Herodotus was the first historian known to systematically and critically collect his material and later arrange it in a logical narrative. The Histories is a work recording his life’s investigations, and it was so influential that its title, ἱστορία, passed into Latin (historia) and led to the modern English word “history” itself. The work was a combination of history, geography, and ethnography (the study of people and cultures). Like modern geographers, Herodotus seemed to have a keen sense of change: “I shall . . . proceed with the rest of my story recounting cities both lesser and greater, since many of those that were great long ago have become inferior, and some that are great in my own time were inferior before. And so, resting on my knowledge that human prosperity never remains constant, I shall make mention of both without discrimination” (Herodotus 2013).

Herodotus’s oral and written histories were laden with facts. His work is the earliest Greek prose to have survived intact. His revolutionary status stems from his breadth and depth of facts such as the periodic flooding of the Nile, the method of collecting spices by the people of Arabia, Darius’s attack on Scythia, and the inroduction of writing to Greece by the Phoenicians. The accounts Herodotus wrote about India are among the oldest records of Indian civilization by someone who did not live there. Moreover, Herodotus had a keen sense of the purpose of his research, and as such, he was far ahead of his time. Indeed, at the beginning of The Histories, he wrote “This is the showing-forth of the inquiry of Herodotus of Halicarnassus, so that neither what has come to be from man in time might become faded, nor that great and wondrous deeds, those shown forth by Greeks and those by barbarians, might be without their glory; and together with all this, also through what cause they warred with each other.”

While some debate exists as to whether Herodotus borrowed some techniques and facts from earlier scholars, his influence is undeniable, and his reputation is growing rather than shrinking. Some of the things he wrote fell into disfavor beginning in the Renaissance and were not believed again until modern times. For example, his description of the labyrinth in Egypt was not fully believed, but its discovery in the 19th century, 11.5 miles (18.5 km) from the pyramid of Hawara, confirmed Herodotus’s account. His description of the city of Gelonus, located in Scythia, north and east of the Black Sea, as being thousands of times larger than the city of Troy was not believed until Troy was rediscovered in 1975. His archaeological investigation of the ancient city—now underwater—of Heracleion in Egypt gave credibility to Herdotus’s claim that the city was founded during Egypt’s New Kingdom period. His description of “giant ants” in the eastern part of the Persian Empire, whose tunnels unearthed gold dust, was thought to be too fantastic to be real until French ethnologist Michel Peissel’s work in the 20th century confirmed Herodotus’s story. Peissel found that in an isolated region of northern Pakistan, the Minaro tribal people confirmed that for generations, they had used the gold dust brought to the surface by the burrowing Himalayan marmot. The marmot seems to be Herodotus’s “giant ant.”

Much advice to everyone communicating a message these days, from professors to marketers to those presenting at conferences, seems to focus on the ability to communicate—to tell a story. Herodotus’s work was also revolutionary in that it possessed the ability to captivate the reader—it was interesting, even if the interest was generated in part from an element of spectacle—exotic tales, exciting events, and great dramas. Herodotus’s oral and written histories sometimes contained folk tales and even a moral.

Furthermore, the histories of Herodotus gave a sense of nationalism, a collective sense of the “Greek experience,” for the first time. Before his accounts of the Persian wars with Greece, history had been represented only by local or family traditions. After his accounts, people began to think of a larger-scale experience and structure: that of a nation (Webb 1911). While it took centuries to develop, this was the first evidence of the thinking behind the rise of the nation-state. The nation-state would have an enormous influence on just about every aspect of modern life, from politics to land use, and from commerce to the worldviews of individuals.

Herodotus’s “modern” approach to scholarship, his attention to place, and his seeming delight in the diversity and unity of humankind make him revolutionary to ethnography, to history, to anthropology, and to geography.

See also: Strabo

HIGH-RESOLUTION MAPPING

Going Local

The map that showed the whole world, or at least what was known to the cartographer making the map, was a revolution in geography (see Mercator, Gerardus; Anaximander). But the development of larger-scale, detailed maps has a history as long as that of the development of world maps and has also revolutionized geography. The first of these larger-scale maps were maps of individual cities. These city maps developed most fully in areas where civilizations began to flourish.

Why civilizations developed in some areas and not others is a subject of scholarly debate, and the debate is inherently geographic in nature. Civilizations, ancient and modern, are very much tied to and reflective of their physical and cultural geography. Challenge-and-response theory holds that challenges forced humans to make efforts that resulted in the rise of civilizations. Material theory holds that material surplus (such as food) freed some people from having to obtain materials, making specialization of labor possible. In areas not conducive to agriculture, waterworks were developed, making large communities possible. Other scholars argue that religious and other nonmaterial forces provided a sense of unity and purpose that made civilizations possible (Duiker and Spielvogel 2010).

An engraved map of Antwerp, Belgium, by Braun and Hogenberg, 1572–1579. Maps have been published in a wide variety of formats over thousands of years at increasing resolution, and have long served to shape how individuals navigate through and perceive their surroundings. (DEA/R. Merlo/De Agostini/Getty Images)

Whatever the cause, the first Mesopotamian civilization was created by the Sumerians, who by 3000 BCE had established a number of independent cities. Geography once again played a significant role: Through a system of controlling the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, including the digging and flooding of irrigation ditches, the Sumerians expanded agriculture into the desert. As cities expanded, they exercised political control over the surrounding countryside, in effect becoming city-states. Scholars agree that in around 2300 BCE, the first city map was created in stone for a city in Mesopotamia named Lagash. The city, modern Al-Hiba, was located northwest of the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, about 13.6 mi (22 km) east of modern-day al-Shatrah, Iraq. It had extensive commercial connections with faraway lands, and one of its kings, Gudea, brought in cedars from Lebanon, diorite from eastern Arabia, and copper and gold from central and southern Arabia. From these connections and from its modern archaeological mound covering 1 × 2 miles (1.6 × 3.2 km), Lagash must have been sizeable, so much so that a city map was needed of its streets and other features. A nearby excavation at the Sumerian city of Nippur yielded a city map from about 1500 BCE. Some consider this to be the oldest city map, since that of Lagash is known only from writings about it rather than an actual fragment. The Nippur map, on a clay tablet, features a temple, a city park, the city wall and gates, a canal, the River Euphrates, and Sumerian cuneiform labels.

Both in manuscripts as well as in early printed books completed during the Late Middle Ages, cities are often shown in an oblique view from an elevated viewpoint. These cityscapes employed mathematical perspectives and projections, perhaps most widely developed in Italy. A good example of a geometrically exact and highly detailed work of this cityscape design is the enormous six-panel city map of Venice created by Jacopo de' Barbari, completed around 1500. It measured 55 by 111 inches (139 × 282 cm). In addition, the period’s nautical charts sometimes depicted partly stylized cityscapes drawn in pictogram form, such as that found in Cristoforo Buondelmonti’s Liber insularum archipelagi (Book of Islands), dating from 1422. The Nuremberg Chronicle of 1493 contained over 100 city views. Prints began to be created from enormous woodcuts and woodblocks of cityscapes, and the copperplate process that began in Antwerp made more detailed illustrations possible. The oblique-view map remained popular through the early 20th century, blending art and cartography. These views included climate or vegetation conditions; characteristics of ports, walls, and magnificent buildings; and other economic and historical characteristics of the cities in text form. Twentieth-century printed city maps were often sponsored by chambers of commerce, featuring advertisements for city businesses along their margins. They often contained grids, with an index on the map that listed streets and points of interest that lay in the specific grid cells, such as “A2” or “C4.” As cities grew, they could no longer be shown effectively on one sheet, and city atlases in bound books became a staple for most delivery services and taxi drivers.

Road maps that showed trading routes (and, eventually, improved roadways) had long existed. The earliest road map is considered to be the Turin Papyrus Map. Drawn around 1160 BCE, this map depicts routes through a mining region east of Thebes in ancient Egypt. The Dura-Europos route map of 253 CE, which is the oldest known preserved map of a part of Europe, is preserved as a fragment only. However, this fragment, drawn onto a leather portion of a Roman soldier’s shield, is enough to show evidence that it depicts towns along the northwest coast of the Black Sea. The Tabula Peutingeriana from 350 CE plots the Cursus Publicus, the Roman road network that extended from Europe and North Africa to West Asia. The Gough Map of 1360 is the oldest known road map of Great Britain.

Aaron Arrowsmith

English surveyor, cartographer, and geographer Aaron Arrowsmith (1750–1823) created many notable and influential maps, including those of North America (1796), the Pacific Ocean (1798), Scotland (1807), Africa (1802), Mexico (1810), and South India (1822). His map of North America was very useful to Thomas Jefferson in making his case to Congress to fund the expedition of Lewis and Clark, and it was useful to the explorers themselves. After Aaron Arrowsmith died, for many decades his sons Aaron and Samuel and his nephew John published geography manuals and atlases, including the London Atlas, and maps of Australia, North America, Africa, and India. Despite his lack of formal education, he was a chief advocate for geography and cartography, and he helped found the Royal Geographical Society.

The itinerarium, a listing of towns and other stops with intervening distances, predated modern road maps but was, in effect, a geographic document. In the 18th century, maps became more portable, and one of the first city pocket atlases was the 1854 Collins’ Illustrated Atlas of London drawn by Richard Jarman. The bicycle craze of the late 1800s fueled demand for bicycle-centric maps of cities, which also helped revive interests in roadways, which by this time railroads had far eclipsed. Early motorists used bicycle maps, but soon after, Rand McNally’s first road map, of New York City, was published in 1904, and Michelin’s in 1910. The descriptive auto route guide map was the most popular form of early road map, containing written evaluations of routes, conditions, points of interest, city driving laws, occasional photos, and most importantly, indications of where to turn before the days of adequate signage. The first was made by Rand McNally II and his bride en route from Chicago to Milwaukee on their honeymoon.

Thereafter the avalanche of standard road maps came: Gousha, General Drafting, and Rand McNally produced most of the eight billion free maps handed out at American gas stations from 1920 to 1980. The strip maps from the early 20th century survived in the American Automobile Association’s “Triptik” format beginning in the 1950s. Like city street maps, road maps during the late 20th century were often bound into atlases, with each page covering a specific region, often an administrative or political district, or simply a rectangle covering a specific latitude and longitude, or an arbitrary piece of the Earth’s surface covering a certain grid square. As the atlases lengthened, so did their indexes of the names of roads, towns, parks, and other points of interest. National mapping agencies such as the Federal Agency for Cartography and Geodesy in Germany, the Ordnance Survey in the United Kingdom, and the U.S. Geological Survey in the United States played an important role in local mapping with their large-scale detailed topographic programs (see National Mapping Agencies).

With the rise of 21st-century GPS navigation and digital maps, the use of printed maps waned markedly for the first time in history. Digital maps are more portable, versatile, accessible, and up to date—and less expensive—than paper maps could ever be (see Web Mapping). Digital maps can be combined with other data of the user’s own choosing. With Rand McNally’s TripMaker, Google Maps, or other online mapping tools, the stage was set for anyone to be able to generate their own turn-by-turn directions (see Web Mapping), at first by printing from Web maps during the 1990s, and then received as spoken and digitally mapped turn-by-turn directions from a GPS receiver or smartphone in the 2000s. Like the paper maps that preceded them, these digital maps over time showed increasing amounts of detail, down to individual traffic lanes and the outlines of buildings, with an option of combining the map with a satellite image.

This centuries-old trend toward increasing detail does not stop at building outlines. A new frontier in mapping and geographic information systems (GIS) is mapping interior spaces—where most people spend the majority of their time. GPS technology and integrating GIS with computer-aided drafting (CAD) systems form much of today’s building information modeling (BIM). Interior space mapping is being used for applications in construction, real estate, asset allocation (everything from tracking gurneys and medical equipment in hospitals to mapping fiber-optic cable, plumbing, and electricity on a university campus), evacuation routes and emergency management, and even in retail, helping businesses understand how to best position their merchandise so that customers will find it. Moreover, the integration of space, place, design, city planning, landscape architecture, and geography is being fused in the emerging field of geodesign. UAV imagery with spatial accuracy of only a few centimeters and high-precision lidar fuel 2D and 3D models and images for an increasing area of the planet at incredibly high resolution (see Remote Sensing).

City maps did more than help people navigate cities. They became the primary means for planning parks, housing, transportation, water and sewer lines, and other facets of life that enabled modern cities. These geographic tools enabled people to think not just about what their city was like, but also what it could become. Things that many cities took for granted, such as tree cover, were now seen as assets, ones that needed to be cared for and planned for, not just for their financial benefits, but also for aesthetic and health reasons. Local maps helped foster the environmental movement and led to an interest in protecting the land, because now people could study in detail the changes that their senses told them were occurring (see Environmental Movement; Land Protection). Road maps enabled people to feel confident in venturing forth to places across their own country and even to other countries, encouraging exploration and cultural interaction. Through the identification of what was missing, the maps also encouraged the construction of modern transportation systems. Modern mapping technologies are transforming how people plan, manage, and even navigate through cities, rural areas, and interior spaces. Geotechnologies are behind each app on a phone or in a public square, indicating the time to the next bus, or how many parking spaces still exist in the adjacent parking lot, what the weather will be today, or the distance to the desired office or coffee shop. These technologies are altering the way that space and place are perceived, and ultimately they are changing the way that people interact with and shape the physical and cultural geography around them.

See also: Anaximander; Environmental Movement; Geographic Information Systems (GIS); Land Protection; Magellan, Ferdinand; Mercator, Gerardus; National Mapping Agencies; Northwest Ordinance; Remote Sensing, Web Mapping

HIPPARCHUS

Loving Truth and Getting the Figures Right

Nearly 1,500 years before the advent of the foundations and the tools for modern mapmaking, the Greek astronomer Hipparchus (190–120 BCE) foresaw the requirements of the global map. Working in the 2nd century BCE, his work was revolutionary to geography in two ways.

One of the ways that Hipparchus was revolutionary to geography was devising a system of mapping the world based on a new concept—that of latitude and longitude. Hipparchus insisted that a map must be based only on astronomical measurements of these angles that he called latitudes and longitudes. He also believed in triangulating from known points to find unknown distances and locations. For his geographic coordinate system, Hipparchus proposed a grid of 360°, drawing on the Babylonian system of sexagecimal (base 60) numbers. He was also the first to determine latitude from star observations. He also suggested that longitude could be determined by simultaneous observations of lunar eclipses from distant places. He improved the latitudes provided by Eratosthenes for many places, including Athens, Sicily, and the southern point of India.

Fundamental to the geographic understanding of the Earth is knowing the motion of the Earth and its relationship to other celestial objects. The Earth’s movement influences seasons, climate, ocean currents, local weather, weathering, ecoregions, the development of plant and animal life, and much more. The second revolutionary way that Hipparchus impacted geographical thought was through his work in astronomy, and in particular, Earth-sun relationships. He discovered the precession of the equinoxes (46 seconds' distance annually), caused by the slow change in the direction of the axis of rotation of the Earth. The precession is the slow westward motion of the points where the noon sun is straight overhead at the Equator at the equinoxes; this is caused by the greater attraction of the sun and moon at the Equator, so that the times at which the sun crosses the Equator come at shorter intervals than they would otherwise do. In other words, the time between the four sections of the ecliptic—the winter solstice, the vernal equinox, the summer solstice, and the autumnal equinox—is not uniform.

Hipparchus's (190–120 BCE) revolutionary discoveries included introducing numerical data from observations into models of Earth-sun relationships and suggesting a grid for world mapping based on latitude and longitude. (Bettmann/Getty Images)

Hipparchus did not pat many of his contemporaries on the back; he was often critical of them. For example, he rather ruthlessly exposed errors in Phaenomena, a popular poem written by Aratus, based on a treatise (which is now lost) by Eudoxus of Cnidus that named and described the constellations. He disagreed with Eratosthenes’s mapping based on measurements taken on the ground, and for internal contradictions and inaccuracies in determining positions of cities, mountains, and other features. He was so opposed to Eratosthenes’s methods that he wrote a three-volume treatise, Against the Geography of Eratosthenes. None of these books survive, but thanks to Strabo, we know about them (see Eratosthenes; Strabo).

His work was so accurate that, for example, he calculated the length of the year to within 6.5 minutes. His calculation of the distance to the moon of between 59 and 67 Earth radii was remarkable (the correct distance is 60 Earth radii). Beyond geography, he made numerous contributions to mathematics; some say that he invented trigonometry. In astronomy he also made an enormous impact: His star catalog contained 850 stars. As is evident in the accounts of many other people in this book, Hipparchus was diligent; Ptolemy called him “industrious,” and he was depicted on the frontispieces of books of astronomy long after his death (see Ptolemy).

Ptolemy referred to Hipparchus as philalēthēs—a “lover of truth.” Besides exposing inaccuracies in others’ writings, as we have seen, he also was willing to revise his own beliefs in the light of new evidence. Furthermore, Hipparchus was extremely precise and accurate in his measurements. He used an especially accurate value for the obliquity of the ecliptic, 23° 40', improving his contemporaries’ estimates that had provided a figure of 24°. Hipparchus’s measurement was even better than that used by Ptolemy 275 years later. He also opposed the prevailing view that the Atlantic Ocean, the Indian Ocean, and the Caspian Sea were all parts of a single ocean. He extended the limits of the inhabited part of the Earth, down to the Equator and up to the Arctic Circle, which he termed the oikoumenê.

Although all the necessary instruments of measurement of space and time were not available to Hipparchus, he was visionary enough to see what needed to be done, even if he himself could not accomplish it. This, too, was revolutionary—recognizing when models pointed to the truth, even if instruments did not exist to provide additional data. But he may have invented a key instrument, the planispheric astrolabe, used to determine the time from the positions of stars (see Cross-Staffs, Astrolabes, and Other Devices). Even when he was anchored in some of the erroneous thinking of his day—for example, that the stars and moon orbited the Earth, and that their orbits were perfect circles—he was forward-thinking. For example, even though Hipparchus did not see the planets as planets, he acknowledged that the five planets’ movements “were not in agreement with the hypotheses of the astronomers of that time” (Toomer 1974).

Hipparchus was born in Nicaea, Bithynia (currently known as Iznik, in Turkey). As a young man, he compiled records of local weather patterns throughout the year into a weather calendar (parapēgmata). Most of his adult life was apparently spent on doing research on the island of Rhodes, the most easterly in the Aegean Sea. Despite the seeming isolation of this island, it was near the strait that connected the Aegean to the Black Sea, and it was on a shipping route between Greece and Egypt, allowing him ready communication with the outside world. He communicated regularly with observers at Alexandria in Egypt, and most likely also with astronomers at Babylon. Like many geographers of his time, Hipparchus was also an astronomer. Perhaps this was because keen observations of the landscape naturally included the skies. Field study, particularly involving weather observation, is common to the development of many geographers, and Hipparchus was no exception. Like other geographers, he was diligent in his recordings—his weather data spans a 20-year period, from 147 to 127 BCE. In some ways, with his observations he foreshadowed those that geographers 2,000 years later would make, such as Maury’s of the ocean and Léon Teisserenc de Bort’s of the atmosphere.

Some revolutionary moments in this book, such as Wegener’s theory on continental drift, took years or even decades to take hold (see Wegener, Alfred). Hipparchus’s influence, by contrast, was felt right away, to as much an extent as the communications of his time allowed. Moreover, his influence persisted, even though he was wrong about some Earth-sun relationships. Despite the fact that only one of his works has survived, and that not even a major one (his Commentary on Aratus and Eudoxus), he was listed among the famous men of Bithynia by Strabo, the Greek geographer and historian (64–24 BCE). Pliny the Elder also refers to him. Ptolemy (85–165 CE) makes numerous references to him, particularly in the great astronomical compendium Almagest. In Nicaea, coins depicting Hipparchus looking at a globe were minted. His image also appears on coins produced under five different Roman emperors, between 138 CE and 253 CE.

See also: Cross-Staffs, Astrolabes, and Other Devices; Eratosthenes; Harrison, John; Ptolemy; Strabo; Wegener, Alfred

HOMER

The Iliad and the Odyssey: The Quest as Geographic Theme

Why do Homer’s epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey merit consideration among the 100 most revolutionary moments in geography? Unlike authors of several works described in this book, in the Iliad and the Odyssey, Homer’s personality is completely hidden from the reader: he refrains from narrating in the first person; he does not otherwise refer to himself as his plots develop and the narratives proceed. Furthermore, some of the places and place names referred to are not even real; they are mythical. Debate continues to this day on whether Homer composed either work, or whether Homer wrote alone or with others, or even whether Homer was a real person. So why were these poems revolutionary to geography?

Despite all of these concerns, the impact of these works was and is profound. The Iliad and the Odyssey (δύσσεια, Odýsseia in Greek) are the two oldest existing works of Western literature, composed near the end of the 8th century BCE. They contain much content that is geographic in nature. In fact, the Iliad is considered by most to be the beginning of Greek literature. It is a story about when Greece was at war with Troy, a city on the coast of Turkey. According to legend, the Trojan War occurred hundreds of years before Homer was born. The cause of the war was Helen of Troy, the wife of Menelaus, the king of the Greek city of Sparta. Helen was carried off to Troy by Paris, who was the son of the Trojan king, Priam. Paris had the goddess Aphrodite’s assistance. Menelaus’s brother, Agamemnon, ruled Mycenae, a different kingdom in Greece. It was Agamemnon who led an army to Troy, determined to retrieve Helen.

The Odyssey was composed on the coastal region of Anatolia, Greece, in a city called Ionia. The Odyssey focuses on Odysseus, a Greek hero, and his 10-year voyage home to Ithaca after the fall of Troy. Everyone at home has assumed he has died, since his travels have taken him so long. His wife, Penelope, and son Telemachus are left to deal with the Mnesteres (in Greek, Μνηστρες), or Proci, who compete for Penelope’s hand in marriage. The Odyssey was written as 12,110 lines of dactylic hexameter in a poetic dialect of ancient Greek—a literary amalgam of Aeolic Greek, Ionic Greek, and other ancient Greek dialects. Most editions—ancient and modern translations—are divided into 24 books, which makes the reading convenient; however, the division might not be how it was originally intended.

A scene from Homer’s Iliad. His Iliad and Odyssey, the oldest sources of Western literature, had an important influence on exploration and on geographic scholarship over the centuries. (The Athenaeum, http://www.the-athenaeum.org)

Both poems had great influence in the ancient world, as well as throughout the Middle Ages and into modern times. Their ancient influence can be seen in that they survive in a surprisingly large number of manuscripts, which implies that they were laboriously copied by numerous other scholars who had great respect for the poems. During the Middle Ages, they were among the few texts of ancient Greece that continued to be taught. Today, they have been translated into many modern languages, are read and performed around the world, and appear in a wide variety of forms and references in music, literature, and theater.

The word “odyssey” has come to mean a truly epic voyage in English and in many other languages. The coupling of geography with exploration became especially prominent from 1500 to 1800, and indeed, for many scholars and for the general public, to be a geographer during most of that period was to be an explorer. Professional societies such as the National Geographic Society and the Royal Geographic Society that sponsored geographic expeditions and widely read magazines perpetuated that notion, for good or ill, into the early years of the 20th century.

On a subtler but still important level, the poems also influenced geography because they describe the influence that choices have, whether made by fighting men, women, or serfs. The idea of human choices influencing historical and geographic events (as well as land use and, later, the environment) would be a constant theme in geographic research. It is manifested today as “human–environment interaction.” Furthermore, Odysseus’s name in Greek means “trouble”—both getting into trouble and doling it out, as often happens during his travels. He has much trouble getting home; winds, sirens, shipwrecks, and other distractions make it difficult. “Getting home” while facing geographic challenges is a pervasive theme in modern geographic-based fiction and nonfiction, from early 20th-century tales about Shackleton’s voyages to the South Pole (see Antarctica) to Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air about a trek to Mount Everest, to Robert Whitaker’s book The Mapmaker’s Wife describing the French survey in Ecuador (see French Geodesic Mission). Finally, a pervasive theme of geographic research is that on a wide variety of scales from local to global, the Earth is in trouble (see Environmental Movement). One theme of geography action research is to use geography to make wiser, more efficient, and more sustainable decisions about the Earth, which is also a focus in the use of geographic information systems (see Geographic Information Systems).

Another interesting impact that Homer had on geography was through archaeology, as a result of his writings about the city of Troy. In medieval times, the city’s location had been forgotten, to the point where many doubted its existence. Heinrich Schliemann (1822–1890), an enthusiastic amateur archaeologist, became determined to find Troy no matter the cost. In fact, he may have done so, but his unscientific method and mistakes continue to foster controversy. Quitting his business after having learned 18 languages, at age 41 he pursued his lifelong interest in archaeology and Greek history, marrying a Greek woman named Sophia Engastromenos. Over time he developed a strong belief that Hissarlik, Turkey, was the site of ancient Troy. He had to wait two years before finally obtaining a government permit that would allow him to excavate the site, and after having to finance the dig himself, work commenced in 1871. However, unlike today’s careful archeological work, his workers pushed aside rubble, damaging or destroying a settlement estimated to predate Troy by 1,700 years in their zeal to reach “the lowest level.” After uncovering what turned out to be an archaeological treasure, he ignored his promises to consult Turkish museums and took some artifacts to Greece. He eventually gave them to the Berlin Museum, but they disappeared during World War II. When the artifacts reappeared in 1996 on display in Moscow, scholars agreed that this “Priam’s treasure” was actually a remnant of a much earlier culture of 3,000 BCE (early Bronze Age) and did not belong to the Troy-era king. When Schliemann died in 1890, his widow funded further excavations. Wilhelm Dörpfeld, who was more scientific in his approach, eventually discovered nine separate cities at the Hissarlik site, one on top of the other. The city now believed to be the Troy of Homer’s stories is the layer Troy VIIa. Troy VIII, which stood while Homer actually lived, was a small Greek village.

The Odyssey includes many tales of travels over ocean and land—on and to the Greek mainland, to Troy, Sparta, Egypt, and elsewhere. The writings contain and are influenced by geographic phenomena of many types, including rivers, mountains, oceans, climate, weather, flora, and fauna. For example, in the 13th book of the Iliad, Poseidon (the god of the sea) is seated on the highest peak on Samothrace Island, “whence all Ida was visible and the city of Priam and the ships of the Achaeans.” An examination of a map of the Aegean Sea of locations discussed in the Iliad reveals that the direct line of sight between Samothrace and the Troad is blocked by the island of Imbros. However, visitors to the currently accepted site of Troy are able to see the prominent 1,524-meter peak of Samothrace just over one small section of Imbros. Thus, when Homer put Poseidon “on the topmost peak of wooded Samos,” he must have relied on his own personal experiences when exploring, remembering that it would be possible for the god to see Troy from the peak of Samothrace.

Other examples of attention to geography abound. The detail of gushing springs and running rivers around Troy is an accurate portrayal of the plain near the currently accepted location of the city. At another point, Odysseus and some of his sailors stay with Aeolus, who gives Odysseus a bag that contained all of the winds with the exception of the west wind, which was a gift that was to promise a safe return to their home. Unfortunately, the sailors are convinced that the bag contains gold, and they open it while Odysseus is sleeping; the winds fly out, creating a storm that turns the ship around, away from Ithaca. In another example, Odysseus and his crew cross the “ocean” (the Mediterranean Sea), guided by Circe to a harbor at the western edge of the world. Later, they land on the island of Thrinacia, where the god Zeus creates a storm so that they cannot leave. Scholars do not believe that Homer could have visited all of the locations he wrote about, but instead that he must have learned about some of them from listening to sailors’ accounts. In that sense, Homer is similar to other geographers (e.g., see Ibn Battuta), in that he listened carefully to tales from other explorers. Other places were fabrications by Homer and cannot be taken literally. Even so, the Iliad and the Odyssey can be regarded, in some ways, as the oldest geographic writings in existence. Its theme of a quest would later help drive geographic exploration and influence modern geographic scholarship as well as popular geography-themed literature.

See also: Environmental Movement; French Geodesic Mission; Geographic Information Systems (GIS); Ibn Battuta

HUTTON, JAMES

The Present Is the Key to the Past

How old is the Earth? Because they are curious about processes acting on, above, and below the surface of the Earth (and indeed, beyond the Earth), the time element has always been intertwined with the questions geographers have had about space. How long did it take to form certain mountain ranges, or to weather them down into plains? How long have ocean currents been flowing the way they are now? How long have the Earth’s magnetic poles been in their current location? The length of time a process has been active is in part dependent on how long it could possibly run, which in turn is dependent upon the total length of the Earth’s history. Therefore, geographers have been curious about the age of the Earth for a long time. But it wasn’t until relatively recently in the history of geography as a discipline that geographers began to realize that the Earth could indeed be very old. This has implications on geographic thought that are still being felt today.

In the latter part of the 1700s, James Hutton (1726–1797) suggested that the Earth was old, much older than had been accepted by scientists of the time, and certainly by the general public. Not only that, but he also suggested that the processes occurring on the Earth at present were the same processes that operated in the past, and that they would be the same processes that would operate in the future. In 1795 he said, “We find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end” (Hutton 1795). Because of this theme of uniformity, Hutton’s concept became known as uniformitarianism.

Hutton’s ideas were very different from the worldview held at the time, by academics and non-academics alike. The predominant view at Hutton’s time, catastrophism, held that only catastrophes such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, floods, and asteroids could modify the surface of the Earth. In addition, most people adhered to the notion that the world was not very old: An oft-cited example of this worldview was work done in the mid-1600s by Archbishop James Ussher, a biblical scholar who determined that the Earth was created in the year 4004 BCE. Hutton observed that the processes of physical geography and geology (such as the accumulation of sediment to form river deltas; the erosion of landforms by ice, wind, and water; and the accumulation of biotic matter and soil to eventually support the growth of trees in alpine environments) all had one thing in common: They were slow. Other processes were occurring at rates that were even slower than these, far too slow for Hutton or anyone to observe, including the compression of sand to form sandstone, the upheaval of mountain ranges, and historical changes in climates, which left behind fossil records of plants and animals in areas that had a vastly different climate than that of the present day.

The implications of uniformitarianism for academic disciplines were profound, beginning with geography and geology. Indeed, Hutton’s influence on geology was so deep (pun intended) that he is often referred to as the “Father of Modern Geology.” Hutton’s theory of plutonism held that rocks forming the Earth’s crust were formed by volcanic activity and subsequently became weathered, eroded, and deposited on the ocean floor to become sedimentary rock, eventually rising again as part of a long cycle. This contradicted Abraham Werner’s neptunism theory, which stated that the Earth had formed from a mass of water and suspended material that formed rocks as layers of sediment, becoming continents as the water retreated. Neptunists held that the Earth was formed by processes that no longer operated, and Hutton maintained that the processes that formed the Earth were still operating. Hutton also influenced the study of physical geography, from the interpretation of landforms in geomorphology—studying how they formed and their resulting composition and physical shape—to the study of change on the Earth as an underlying theme of geography. The changes might be sudden, such as a rock avalanche, but most changes—slow as they were—had profound implications. But the influence of uniformitarianism on other sciences beyond geography and geology was profound as well, for disciplines such as biology, chemistry, and even astronomy. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine Darwin’s theories taking root without a century of uniformitarianism behind them.

The influence of Hutton continues to be felt today, extending to the late 20th-century Gaia hypothesis, which proposes that organisms interact with their inorganic surroundings to form a self-regulating, complex system that contributes to maintaining the conditions for life on Planet Earth, including the regulation of salinity in the oceans, global surface temperature, and oxygen in the atmosphere. This hypothesis has roots in uniformitarianism, as Hutton maintained that geological and biological processes are interlinked.

Although Hutton discussed his Earth theory with some of his colleagues, he did not write it down until 1785, after he was asked to address one of the first meetings of the newly founded Royal Society of Edinburgh. The full text of his theory was published in the Transactions of the Society in 1788 under the title “Theory of the Earth; or, An Investigation of the Laws Observable in the Composition, Dissolution and Restoration of Land upon the Globe.” Some say that Hutton was not a very good writer, which may explain why his theory was not popular until after he had died. In 1802, his friend John Playfair published Hutton’s Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory. This was followed in 1830 with the publication of Principles of Geology by Charles Lyell, which drew heavily on Hutton’s ideas. It was not until 1899 that the Geological Society of London published Hutton’s unfinished third volume. But even such observations as those about the transportation potential and force that glaciers possessed went unnoticed for many years.

Perhaps Hutton’s theories were slow to catch on because the whole notion of an old Earth, something most people take for granted today, was truly revolutionary; it took time for people to grasp Hutton’s ideas and then even longer to accept them. Hutton’s Earth wasn’t just a few thousand years old, but people reasoned, and rightly so, that if his ideas were correct, the processes witnessed today would take a very long time to form mountains, erode those mountains into steppes or plains, and lift them again to form new mountains. The implication was clear: The Earth could be even millions of years old. Today, the Earth is estimated to be approximately 4.55 billion years old. But such an ancient Earth was as foreign a concept then as the sun-centered solar system had been to most people 300 years earlier.

Hutton was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, into a family of merchants. He began his career in classic humanities but became fascinated by chemistry. At 17, he was dismissed from his apprenticeship at a law office for conducting chemistry experiments during office hours. At that time, the only way to learn more about chemistry was to study medicine, which Hutton did, becoming a doctor of medicine at age 23. He traveled to France and the Netherlands. He inherited farmland from his father in southeast Scotland, and upon being immersed—literally—in the field, he developed interests in agriculture, meteorology, physics, and geology. One of his first observations was that the sedimentary rocks on his land were made partly from the decomposition of plants and animal shells. He correctly identified the linkages between conglomerates and gravel, between limestone and accumulation of organic debris, between sandstone and sand, and between shale and mud and silt. From his observation that this wide distribution of rocks formed the continents, he came to understand that they could only have been originally deposited in the sea. He correctly interpreted basalt as solidified material that had once been molten, and that tilting and contortions in surface rocks were the result of deep-seated forces resulting from the internal heat of the Earth.

But just as revolutionary as Hutton’s conclusions were his methods. He believed that the purpose of earth science was to collect objective data by first observing first and then interpreting the evidence with a minimum amount of “imagination,” instead of beginning with a hypothesis and then attempting to fit the observations into it. Hutton’s theory evolved in this fashion from his observations. His belief that the history of Earth should be interpreted in the light of what is happening now or has happened recently is commonplace today, but it was earth-shattering during his time. His methods can be summarized as “The present is the key to the past.”

Hutton’s involvement with the construction of the Forth and Clyde Canal in Scotland—living as he did at the beginning of the great canal-building era—allowed him to closely observe the rock strata exposed from the construction. As is evident in the other stories in this book, many geographers, past and present, were inspired from their close work on the landscape, whether in agriculture, fishing, rock quarrying, collecting plant or fossil specimens, or observing life and culture in cities or villages (e.g., see Smith, William; interestingly, he also worked on a canal-building project). Hutton’s background in canal construction also illustrates the importance of practical work that often brings researchers face to face with their surroundings—not only the physical work, but also being in contact with fellow members of their own communities, for geography has always been as much about people as it is about the physical environment.

While Hutton’s comment about finding no beginning was challenged with the emergence of the Big Bang theory of the 20th century, much of his uniformitarianism continues to be the dominant framework shaping current research in geography, geology, and many other sciences. The debates and discussion about the age of the Earth are excellent examples of the close working relationship between geographers and geologists.

See also: Smith, William

H

HARRISON, JOHN

Solving the Longitude Problem

Further Reading

HAYDEN, POWELL, AND WHEELER SURVEYS

Systematic Exploring and Mapping

Further Reading

HENRY THE NAVIGATOR

Winds, Seas, and Ships

Further Reading

HERODOTUS

Documenting The Histories: The Diversity and Unity of Humankind

Further Reading

HIGH-RESOLUTION MAPPING

Going Local

Further Reading

HIPPARCHUS

Loving Truth and Getting the Figures Right

Further Reading

HOMER

The Iliad and the Odyssey: The Quest as Geographic Theme

Further Reading

HUTTON, JAMES

The Present Is the Key to the Past

Further Reading