Historic Maps
A lot of people don’t really like looking at old maps, simply because they don’t see any point to it. After all, maps that are hundreds of years old are not as accurate as the ones that are made today and since they have no real value in the practical sense, what is the point of looking at them? Well, there are definitely a lot of reasons as to why historic maps can be fun to look at and some of those reasons are explored in further detail below.
The first reason as to why historic maps can be useful to look at is that it can illustrate to you the history of map-making. If you are a person that enjoys looking at the maps today, then take a moment to compare those maps to the historic maps that you might not enjoy viewing as much. Take a look at the two maps side by side and take note of the things that are different. There are going to be a lot of things that are different, such as the style of cartographic design and the color schemes used, but there are also going to be a lot of things that are similar. For example, the idea of scales, neat lines, borders, compass direction points and naming conventions are all exactly the same today as they were two hundred years ago. There is a nice feeling that a map lover gets when they can connect the dots along those lines.
In addition to that, historic maps also allow you to appreciate what life was like back then for people of that vocation. While today maps are bought and sold by the thousands each day, when the world was being explored it was really only explorers that had any real need for maps; aside from explorers maps were only purchased by governments and rich people looking for luxuries. Therefore, a lot of map-makers were really hobbyists that had other professions they used to make a living and to see the way in which a lot of those maps are masterfully created knowing that it was not the map-maker’s main profession can really give you a better appreciation for the historical periods that the map might be from.
These are just two reasons as to why historic maps might be useful. If you follow the line of thinking presented above, you will come up with many more reasons; reasons that will make you want to go out and buy some historic maps to start your collection.
General Motors has a new concept car to show you at this Paris Motor Show we keep talking about. The Chevy Orlando is a 7-seat which will be based on the same platform as the Chevy Cruze. It will have a 105-inch wheelbase and a turbodiesel 2.0 liter engine. The Orlando and the Tacuma prototype will then appear to be one and the same car.
After receiving a Garmin GPS unit for Christmas, I quickly became interested in the ability to enter categorized custom points of interest (POIs) into the device. The first thing I did was collect information on the location of all Allpoint ATMs in the region so I know where to find a free ATM. (I have an ING Direct Orange account, which means no brick-and-mortar locations.)
