by Val Ross
It was odd that Phyllis was unable to find a good London map. People had mapped London for more than 2,000 years, since Roman times. A map from the year 1217 by the English monk Matthew Paris shows the city in such detail, you can see the Tower of London. In 1627, John Speed published a pocket-sized map of London that was a bestseller.
But London had kept growing and changing. So in 1935, what Phyllis Pearsall wanted was not available. There was no map that showed the complicated city of seven million people, with subways and new developments, where some streets had no numbers and others shared identical names. The most complete map of London, Phyllis discovered, was the army’s Ordnance Survey map (showing military locations), published in 1919.
Phyllis phoned her father in New York and said she wanted to publish a new guide to London. Sandor Gross laughed. Then, realizing it wasn’t a bad idea, he told her to leave it to him. Phyllis insisted she wanted to do it herself. Sandor hung up, then fired off a telegram: “Don’t you realize your decisions are bound to be wrong?!” Phyllis ignored him.
She bought a set of Ordnance maps, and realized that to update them she had to do her own research. She set out every day on foot, walking London’s streets, making notes, adding street numbers and subway stops, deleting streets that had disappeared. After putting in as long as eighteen hours a day, she would soak her sore feet and put her notes on cards indexed alphabetically. “So A-to-Z seemed to me the only possible title [for my book],” she later explained. Her father sent a telegram, ordering her to call her guide The OK Map of London instead. Phyllis paid no attention.
A MAP SAVED LONDON
Thematic maps put information into the context of a place. One thematic map of London is said to have saved people from a terrible disease known as cholera.
People knew the symptoms of cholera: giddiness, vomiting, raging headaches, and diarrhea like water, flecked with tiny bits of the victim’s own intestinal lining. Some victims go into convulsions; others curl up in pain and have to be straightened out for burial. But how did cholera spread?
Dr. John Snow of London wasn’t the first to suggest that contaminated water might be the cause of cholera. But he was the first to prove it. In 1849, he published a pamphlet saying that, if toilets of sick people were flushed into the water supply, healthy people would become infected. The Royal College of Physicians rejected his idea, saying, “No sufficient reasons have been found for adopting the theory.”
In 1855, as London reeled from a new cholera epidemic, John Snow republished his pamphlet — this time, with a map. With black dashes it marked the houses where each of 616 cholera deaths had occurred in London’s Soho district. Most of the black was clustered around the Broad Street pump. Near Soho’s eleven other pumps, there were few or no black lines. Dr. Snow begged his neighbors to remove the Broad Street pump handle. Puzzled, they did so. From that day on, the cholera cases dwindled, then disappeared. Later, people learned that a cracked sewer pipe above the pump’s well was leaking sewage into the water.
One day, Phyllis dropped the box of street names that started with T. She ran to collect the cards, but one of them blew away and landed on the roof of a bus. When her first London A-Z was published, it was missing one of the most famous places in London, Trafalgar Square — shown here in the current London A-Z.
For more than a year she worked, retraining her artist’s hand to draw streets with mathematical precision. Then she tracked down her parents’ old Geographia employees and convinced them to help prepare her project for printing.
That first edition of London A-Z said on its cover, “Produced under the direction of Alexander Gross.” Although her father had done no work and had given her no support, Phyllis loved the charming old scoundrel and wanted to honor him. Besides, he had a reputation as a mapmaker, and she didn’t.
At first, Sandor’s name failed to convince London booksellers to take her guidebook. Some turned Phyllis away because she was a woman. Others thought her book looked amateurish. One bookseller, a British Nazi, turned her away because he suspected she was Jewish.
Phyllis stubbornly pestered people to carry her guide. Booksellers who did found that it sold well, so they ordered more copies. When Sandor turned up unexpectedly in London, he was impressed to learn that his daughter’s new business, the Geographer’s A-Z Map Company, was showing a profit, and asked to be made a business partner. Flattered, Phyllis agreed. It wouldn’t matter, she thought, since Sandor now lived in New York.
It was a big mistake. Back in the U.S., her father started pelting her with telegrams: “Consult me on every detail…. Do as I say!” When Phyllis reported that she had just placed a new order for a quarter-million copies of the A-Z, her father raged, “You have inherited your mother’s recklessness! Don’t expect me to get you out of trouble!”
By now it was 1939. Hitlers Nazi armies invaded Poland, and England went to war. Paper was in short supply, and the British government banned the making of maps that might be useful to Germans planning an invasion of England. The Geographer’s A-Z Map Company closed down. As German bombs flattened London, Phyllis realized that the streets she had explored on foot were now choked with rubble. Whole neighborhoods were wiped off the map.
The war ended in 1945, and American soldiers flooding into the city got lost in its maze of streets and bombed-out neighborhoods. Suddenly everybody needed a guidebook again. Sandor decided he was the man to produce it. He came to London to exercise his rights as a partner in the business, and to force his daughter out. She’d be happier sticking to painting, he said.
Father and daughter had a terrible scene in a London restaurant. Then Sandor wrote to Phyllis’s brother, saying that the Geographer’s A-Z Map Company was too important to be left to a woman. “I therefore have no alternative than to give you control of the London business,” Sandor told Tony, giving him his shares in the company. Tony had a wife and child to support, and accepted the offer. Phyllis was so shocked by her family’s betrayal that she collapsed and went blind.
The covers of early and current editions of London A-Z. About 60 million copies have been sold since 1936.
Now it was Sandor and Tony’s turn for a shock. The A-Z employees said they had no intention of working for strangers who had never shown any interest in their work. They were going to stick by Phyllis. Sandor and Tony realized that the A-Z Company might collapse. They backed off.
After several months of rest, Phyllis regained her sight, forgave her father and her brother, and concentrated on rebuilding her company. It would be nice to report that the Gross family never fought again. Alas, Sandor couldn’t help himself. In 1957, bankrupt yet again, he made one more attempt to gain control of the Geographer’s A-Z Map Company. He telegraphed Phyllis that he was coming to London. The ever-optimistic Phyllis replied with a telegram that began, “Darling darling Papa, how we look forward to the joy of being with you …”
Sandor boarded the Queen Mary ocean liner with greed in his old heart, plotting to steal his daughter’s profitable business. Aboard ship, somewhere in the mid-Atlantic, he died peacefully in his sleep. And the Geographer’s A-Z Map Company kept growing.
Phyllis was a good boss. She hired people she trusted and let them get on with the job, while she headed off to paint and to visit friends all over the world. She told her godchildren to call her “Auntie Pig.” But to her employees — her real family now — she was the legendary Mrs. P.
Her last public outing was in 1996. To celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of her company, she took more than 200 A-Z staff and their families to EuroDisney in France. As Phyllis, almost ninety, beamed from her wheelchair, her mapmaking family celebrated the fact that they had become one of the bestselling map publishers in the world, with more than 200 titles in their catalogue.
Maps are about gaining power over a landscape. But Phyllis Isobel Gross Pearsall was no conqueror or colony-founder. Her maps empowered ordinary people — tourists and Londoners alike — to find their way around a confusing city. T
hey enabled Mrs. P to prove that a woman can make a fortune in business. And they showed that a kind heart and hard work can usually find a path through the tangled wilderness of one’s own family.
THE MAPMAKERS’ EYES
Mapping from Above
ON A WARM evening in 1966, Stewart Brand and some friends are sitting on a rooftop in San Francisco, gazing at the full moon. Nine years have passed since the Russians, and then the Americans, sent satellites into space. Tonight those satellites are probably up there, whirring across the dark sky. “Why,” demands Brand, a free-thinking 1960s visionary, “Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?”
His friends agree that such a picture should be taken from space. The next day they put the question on hundreds of buttons. Then they troop off to the public library and look up the addresses of every U.S. congressman and senator, and their secretaries, as well as the members of the Soviet Unions Politburo. Everyone is sent a button.
The trick works — Brand thinks the secretaries put on the buttons so the bosses had to pay attention. The pressure gets to NASA, the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and the result is a photo taken by astronauts on the Apollo Seventeen mission. It appears on later editions of Brand’s The Whole Earth Catalog, the hippie bible he publishes from 1968 until 1985.
On their way to the Moon, the Apollo Seventeen crew sent back this image of the whole Earth (or at least, its Mediterranean and African side). Asia is on the northeast horizon.
Photos taken from the sky are now a key mapmaking tool, helping to answer important questions: Are hurricanes coming? Are crops going to be bountiful enough to feed everyone? Are waterways becoming polluted? Are countries engaging in military buildups?
THE HIGHEST ART
From up high you can see a lot more than ever before. But how can you take what you see and translate it into mapmaking? In 1822, Frenchman Louis Daguerre came up with an invention to fix images of light and dark on chemically treated surfaces. Now we know his “daguerreotypes” much better as “photographs.”
Taking a photograph from a balloon was not for the faint-hearted. The wicker basket suspended from the balloon where the photographer worked often swung wildly in the wind. To make things worse, in those days photographers used a “wet plate” technique that involved coating one side of a silver plate with a chemical solution immediately before use. Then, making sure the sticky plate was kept in complete darkness, the photographer plunged it into a silver nitrate solution to make it light-sensitive. Once the plate was exposed and the photograph taken, it had to be developed on the spot.
How could you do all that in a balloon? In 1857 a man named Gaspard Tournachon, known as Nadar, thought he could sort these problems out by taking aloft a lightproof blanket, and, keeping his chemicals and plates under the blanket, preparing his photo plates by feel. The first time he tried this complicated maneuver, he discovered that the hydrogenated sulfur fumes from his balloon’s fuel desensitized his chemicals. The plates were all blank. So Nadar tried again, this time leaning away from the fumes and out of the basket to prepare his plates. On an autumn day in 1858, Nadar descended from his balloon ride with the world’s first aerial photo: a pale portrait of three houses of a small village on the outskirts of Paris, so clear you could even see a policeman in the street.
Of course, aerial photography hasn’t replaced human-made maps. Human beings still have to judge how to label streets, mark political boundaries, and decide whether a line in a photograph is a road or a fence. What our eyes in the sky give us is a new range of powers.
They even equip us to map through time. Thanks to aerial photography, archaeologists can detect the outlines of structures built thousands of years ago. Photos of Stonehenge taken in the 1920s by English pilot O.G.S. Crawford revealed that the mysterious complex had once stretched in an avenue all the way to the Avon River. Aerial photos like Crawford’s carry human perception to times and places where the human body cannot yet go. Humans haven’t yet visited Mars, but thanks to color photos of the planet’s surface taken in 1976 by the Viking spacecraft, we have scanned its distant tan-colored deserts.
Our first successful attempt to see the world from the sky dates back to when the Cassini family was mapping France. In June 1783, Joseph-Michel and Etienne Montgolfier sent up the first hot-air balloon (they got the idea from watching smoke rise up out of chimneys). Later that same year, on October 15, a daring young man named J.F. de Rozier stepped into a basket below a billowing balloon. The Montgolfier brothers loosened the ropes, and up he went. By stoking a small stove underneath the balloons bottom opening, de Rozier was able to maintain a height of 24 meters (80 feet) for five minutes.
In 1859, the year after Nadar took the world’s first aerial photo, a colonel in the French army, named Aimé Laussedat pioneered “photogrammetry,” or photo-aided mapmaking. He came up with a combination of camera and theodolite and sent his invention aloft on a kite. Eventually he produced a map of Paris based on overlapping aerial photographs.
Aerial photographers had to deal with the fact that, if you look directly down at something, a house or a human, you see a square or a circle. Side views are needed to really make sense of the 3-D shape. At the end of the 19th century, Theodore Schimpflug developed a special aerial camera with eight lenses. Why so many? The center lens pointed directly down, and the others pointed at angles to give those crucial side views.
Artist Honoré Daumier sketched the fearless photographer Nadar taking photos of Paris from his balloon. The artist joked that Nadar had made photography “the highest art.”
Despite these advances, photo-mapping from balloons was awkward simply because balloons were hard to steer. Then, 120 years after the Montgolfier brothers launched humankind skywards, two American brothers, Orville and Wilbur Wright, invented the airplane.
In some ways, taking photos from these first fragile planes was even more hair-raising than leaning out of balloons. Sometimes the photos were snapped by the pilot, who, while trying to keep his rickety machine aloft, would pull a cord attached to a camera fixed to the plane’s struts. Sometimes the photos were taken by a passenger lying face-down with the camera pointed through a hole in the cockpit floor. These were open cockpits, so photographers had to change each photographic plate with fingers clumsy from the freezing cold.
Then came World War I. Germans used zeppelins to take photos of enemy positions; the Allies sent up kite-balloons with cameras attached to snap fortifications at places like Vimy Ridge. These photo-maps proved invaluable for the Canadian troops’ successful assault on Vimy Ridge in 1917.
After World War I, the Australians and Americans began to use aerial photography to complement their geographical surveys. But it was in big, empty Canada that aerial mapping really made sense. In 1919, with surplus warplanes donated by the British, the Canadian government established an Air Board for aerial surveys and started to map places it had been too costly — and just too far — to go before.
Throughout the 1920s, little planes buzzed across the bush and beyond the timberline. Even in summer, it was cold. One pilot who leaned out of his cockpit to admire the view reported that being hit by oncoming ice pellets felt like being “hit full in the face with a hammer.”
The planes in those days weren’t pressurized, and mostly flew at an altitude of 1500 meters (5,000 feet). That meant it was far more effective to take oblique, or side-angled, photos of the lands that stretched on either side of the plane, rather than just the thin strip directly beneath. So Air Board cartographers figured out how to transfer the oblique photos onto a perspective grid and then straighten out the grid. Now serious maps could be made from the thousands of photos flooding into the Air Board and the Topographical Survey of Canada offices. By 1924, the pilots had covered 103,000 km2 (40,000 square miles) with their cameras. In 1925, the Canadian government issued its first official map based on oblique-view aerial photographs. Before long, Canada was the first country to be completely photogr
aphed from the air.
Lumber, hydro, and oil companies also wanted maps. But there weren’t many maps of regions like the Mackenzie River delta or the area east of Lake Athabaska — a region bigger than all of Europe — then known as the Barrens. No one could survey such a place on foot. Even Inuit hunters could hardly eke a living from the empty landscape. But former fighter pilots like Roy Brown were desperate for an excuse to climb back into their cockpits. They started bush pilot companies to survey the land from the air, and to fly in geologists into the wilderness to stake claims.
DEFEATING THE RED BARON
World War I’s most legendary pilot was Germany’s Baron Manfred von Richthofen, known as the Red Baron because he painted the sides of his Fokker tri-plane a bright red. By 1918, the twenty-five-year-old had shot down eighty Allied planes — most of them slow-moving reconnaissance planes scouting and taking photos.
On the morning of April 21, 1918, the Red Baron spotted the No. 3 Australian Squadron observation planes over the fields of northern France. They were guarded by a team of Sopwith Camel planes led by Roy Brown, a Canadian in Britain’s Royal Air Force. That morning Brown was also keeping a special eye on his high-school buddy, Wilfrid “Wop” May, on his first combat mission.
Brown told May to stay out of the dogfights, but May couldn’t resist firing at the German Fokkers. Then his guns jammed and he decided to head back to British lines. The Red Baron spotted May’s plane breaking away, and gave chase. Roy Brown saw his friend in trouble and swooped down. The three planes screamed low over the French fields, sometimes just above treetop height, and then crossed into British airspace. Australian Gunner 3801, Robert Buie, took aim at the Fokker. So did Roy Brown, closing in from behind.