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 and Geoinformation
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
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
Island with literary potential
The small island Isla Robinson Crusoe or formerly Mas a Tierra or Juan Fernandez is located in the Pacific Ocean, about 600 kilometers west of the Chilean mainland. It is part of an archipelago which was discovered in 1574 by the Spanish seafarer Juan Fernandez and later named after
Glow with the Flow: William Hamilton’s Campi Phlegraei (Naples, 1776-1779)
As a British diplomat at the court of the Kingdom of Naples, Sir William Hamilton (1730-1803) had an ideal location to study the volcanoes of the region. Several times he climbed Mount Vesuvius and witnessed the violent and dangerous outbreaks of the time. To capture his observations of
Sebastian Münster, Cosmographia (Basel, 1544)
After 18 years in the making, Sebastian Münster (1488-1552), the German theologian and humanist, finally published Cosmographia in 1544, a monumental Renaissance work. He drew upon a wide variety of sources: on the one hand, Greek and Latin authors such as Herodotus,
Adolf Feller’s postcard collection
The postcard collection belonging to Adolf Feller (1876-1931), a manufacturer of electrical devices from Horgen, contains nearly 54,000 postcards from all over the world. Following Feller’s death in 1931, his daughter Elisabeth took over the collection until the 1970s. The majority of the postcards were sent between 1889 and 1954.