Holiday time is travel time. And the eternal question arises: Where shall we go? Today’s possibilities are countless and, depending on the destination and means of travel, don’t even need to cost that much. As early as 1900, Europeans had, as a result of technological advances, a wide choice of travel destinations to which they could head by ship or train.
MAPS
Digitising maps
Folding maps from the nineteenth century are currently being digitised for the Map Collection at ETH Library’s Digitisation Centre. During the preparation work for the digitisation project, I stumbled across a railway map: it consists of sixteen loose sheets that, assembled correctly, depict
Cartography’s “fairest flower”: the Gyger Map (1667)
For more than 200 years, the map of the Canton of Zurich which Hans Conrad Gyger (1599-1674) completed in 1667 remained one of the most innovative cartographical productions of its age. In 1879 Dr Rudolf Wolf, the first Director of ETH Library, even described it as, “easily the fairest
School maps in the 19th century
At the beginning of the 19th century, the liberal Canton of Aargau assumed a leading role across all school levels in Switzerland’s education system. For example, it opened the first Gymnasium (grammar school) in the country where the teachers were not members
Milestones of Swiss cartography
The history of Swiss cartography begins with a chart of the country, still classed as a mediaeval “mappa mundi”, with Rigi as the centre point. It was published in 1479 in Albrecht von Bonstetten’s first geographic description of Switzerland, Superioris Germaniae confederationis descriptio.
Swiss skiing tour maps
The article from 20.1.2011 talks about skiing maps from the early days of ski sport. In recent years, skiing tours in Switzerland have boomed. In the early years, the high mountains were primarily scaled on skis in the springtime, when the snow cover was hardened and the risk or
The Rhine ports of Basel around 1920
Approximately 10 per cent of Switzerland’s total volume of foreign trade is currently transacted through the three Rhine ports in the city and region of Basel. Around 30 to 40 percent of mineral oil reaches Switzerland via the Rhine ports (Wikipedia, 2011). The maps,
Internment camps in Switzerland
Around 50,000 French, Belgian and Polish soldiers and civilian refugees fleeing from the Wehrmacht crossed the Swiss border in Neuchatel Jura in June 1940. They were disarmed and detained in camps. The map detail depicts the internment camps on 3 July 1940. The French
View from Weid near Zurich
In around 1880 Heinrich Keller draws a detailed panorama of the City of Zurich from Weid, depicting a seemingly rural, loosely built-up urban area. However, signs of progress are already visible. The Swiss Northeastern Railway line runs on a mighty causeway and over a
Guillaume Henri Dufour: topographical map of Switzerland 1:100 000. page 8, Aarau, Lucerne, Zug, Zurich. (Printed in 1926)
The Dufour Map (surveyed and published at the behest of the Swiss Federal authorities, recorded under the supervision of General G.H. Dufour, first edition 1845–1865, updated until 1939) documents the settlement and landscape development of modern Switzerland in the