The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) produced its first topographic map in 1879, the same year it was established. Today, more than 100 years and millions of map copies later, topographic mapping is still a central activity for the USGS. The topographic map remains an indispensable tool for government, science, industry, and leisure. Much has changed since early topographers traveled the unsettled West and carefully plotted the first USGS maps by hand. Advances in survey techniques, instrumentation, and design and printing technologies, as well as the use of aerial photography and satellite data, have dramatically improved mapping coverage, accuracy, and efficiency. Yet cartography, the art and science of mapping, may never before have undergone change more profound than today. A mapping revolution is underway. New technologies are altering the production and use of traditional maps. Even more significantly, the information age has introduced a new cartographic product that is changing the face of mapping: digital data for computerized mapping and analysis. The computer is extending mapping beyond its traditional boundaries. New applications emerge with each technological advance. At their most basic, digital data applications make it possible to display maps on a computer, even a home personal computer. At their most advanced, digital data applications stretch the definition of cartography. This booklet examines topographic mapping and the USGS in this changing cartographic world. It describes the topographic map, its use, its history, its production, and-in light of new technology and the digital mapping revolution-its potential.

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Over the past 2000 years, London has developed from a small town, fitting snugly within its walls, into one of the world's largest and most dynamic cities. London: A History in Maps illustrates and helps to explain the transformation using over 400 examples of maps. Side-by-side with the great, semi-official, but sanitized images of the whole city, there are the more utilitarian maps and plans of the parts--actual and envisaged--which perhaps present more than topographical records. They all have something unique to say about the time when they were created. Peter Barber's book reveals the "inside story" behind one of the world's greatest cities.

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Since its launch in 1987, the History of Cartography series has garnered critical acclaim and sparked a new generation of interdisciplinary scholarship. Cartography in the European Enlightenment, the highly anticipated fourth volume, offers a comprehensive overview of the cartographic practices of Europeans, Russians, and the Ottomans, both at home and in overseas territories, from 1650 to 1800. The social and intellectual changes that swept Enlightenment Europe also transformed many of its mapmaking practices. A new emphasis on geometric principles gave rise to improved tools for measuring and mapping the world, even as large-scale cartographic projects became possible under the aegis of powerful states. Yet older mapping practices persisted: Enlightenment cartography encompassed a wide variety of processes for making, circulating, and using maps of different types. The volume’s more than four hundred encyclopedic articles explore the era’s mapping, covering topics both detailed—such as geodetic surveying, thematic mapping, and map collecting—and broad, such as women and cartography, cartography and the economy, and the art and design of maps. Copious bibliographical references and nearly one thousand full-color illustrations complement the detailed entries.

Excerpt from The Interpretation of Topographic Maps The features shown on topographic maps may, for convenience, be classed in three groups (1) Water, including seas, lakes, ponds, rivers and other streams, canals, swamps, etc.; (2) relief, including mountains, hills, valleys, cliffs, etc.; (3) culture, i. E., works of man, such as towns, cities, roads, railroads, boundaries, etc. The conventional signs used for these features are grouped on P1. II. Variations appear in some maps of early dates. All water features are shown in blue, the smaller streams and canals in full blue lines, and the larger streams, lakes, and the sea by blue water lining. Certain streams, however, which flow during only a part of the year, their beds being dry at other times, are shown, not by full lines, but by lines of dots and dashes. Ponds which are dry during a part of the year are shown by oblique parallel lines. Salt-water marshes are shown by horizontal ruling interspersed with tufts of blue, and fresh-water marshes and swamps by blue tufts with broken horizontal lines. Relief is shown by contour lines in brown. Each contour passes through points which have the same altitude. One who follows a contour on the ground will go neither uphill nor downhill, but on a level. By the use of contours not only are the shapes of the plains, hills, and mountains shown, but also their elevations. The line of the seacoast itself is a contour line, the datum or zero of elevation being mean sea level. The contour line at, say, 20 feet above sea level is the line that would be the seacoast if the sea were to rise or the land to sink 20 feet. Such a line runs back up the valleys and forward around the points of hills and spurs. On a gentle slope this contour line is far from the present coast line; on a steep slope it is near the coast. Thus a succession of these contour lines far apart on the map indicates a gentle slope; if close together, a steep slope; and if the contours run together in one line, as if each were vertically under the one above it, they indicate a cliff. In many parts of the country are depressions or hollows with no outlets. The contours, of course, surround these, just as they surround hills. The small hollows known as sinks are usually indicated by hachures, or short dashes, on the inside of the curve. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.