The Militarization of Cartography

In 1762, in the course of extending the French triangulation into Austria, Cassini de Thury and the Heidelberg professor Christian Mayer measured a baseline in an unusual location. They used the alley, almost three leagues long, leading up to the new observatory in the main building of the Palatine Elector Karl Theodor's summer residence, situated between Mannheim and Heidelberg. Karl Theodor was delighted: "the position of the new base and [that] of the

[67] Roy, "An account of the measurement of a base," 394, 449–50; Roy, "An account of the trigonometrical operation," 268.

[68] Roy, "On the advantages that are likely to rise from the operations on Hounslow Heath" (RS, DM.4.6).

[69] Cassini de Thury, Relation des deux voyages , 1–2.

observatory were two monuments that should coincide."^[70] The base was a monument to the scientific patronage of the creator of the Mannheim Academy of Sciences and to Cassini's knack for fraternizing with nobility and royalty. It symbolized the union of political power and science, so important in the fields of geodesy and cartography at this time and in the next century when national cartography in Europe was militarized. With the technology of triangulation, the geometrical grid—formerly present only in the mind, on maps, or in architecture—was imposed on the landscape itself. Geodetic surveying quantified geographical information, which became atomized and readily presentable in tabular form. This kind of extensive, yet compressed, knowledge was an attractive resource for centralized governmental and military planning. In the terminology of Michel Foucault, the Ordnance Survey and similar organizations brought an expansion of military surveillance from the limited disciplinary units of the garrison and the fortress to the full physical extent of a nation.^[71]

The social ascent of engineers and artillery men was a major ingredient in the genesis of national triangulation as a military operation in Britain, where it first occurred. The new strategy of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars also promoted the fusion of military and national cartography. Larger and more mobile armies now appeared, and the battle conquered the siege as the decisive element in war. That made every place a potential theater of war and created a demand for knowledge of the whole geography, making comprehensive and accurate cartography an essential preparation for warfare.^[72]

[70] Ibid., xxiii, xxxiii, 94–5; Adolf Kistner, Die Pflege der Naturwissenschaften in Mannheim zur Zeit Karl Theodors (Mannheim: Selbstverlag des mannheimer Altertumsverein, 1930), 52–3.

[71] Michel Foucault, Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1977), 184–9, 195–203.

[72] William H. McNeill, The pursuit of power: Technology, armed forces, and society since A.D. 1000 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982), 161–3, 170–1; Richard A. Preston and Sydney F. Wise, Men in arms: A history of warfare and its interrelationships with Western society , 4th ed. (New York and London: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1979), 133–48, 173–80; Alfred Vagts, A history of militarism: Civilian and military , 2d rev. ed. (London: Hollis & Carter, 1959; 1st. edn. 1938), 58, 75–91, 114; N.H. Gibbs, "Armed forces and the art of war," The new Cambridge modern history (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), 10 , 62–9, 74–5; Henning Eichberg, "Geometrie als Barocke Verhaltensnorm: Fortification und Exerzitien," Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung, 1 (1977), 40–50.

In Britain, fortifications were not a major part of the defense system, which relied mainly on the navy. When William Roy proposed in 1766 that a "General Military Map of England" be drawn on the French model, he pointed out that should an enemy reach the British Isles, engagement would necessarily take place in the field, about which detailed geographical knowledge would be required.^[73] In the 1780s the question as to whether Britain should embark on a program of extensive fortification brought heated debate.^[74] The Duke of Richmond advocated defense works for the docks of Plymouth and Portsmouth; he was supported by Pitt, and vehemently opposed by others, who carried Parliament in 1786 by one vote. Richmond's opponents argued that large fortifications would lead to an "unconstitutional" militarization of British society.^[75] Thousands of men living in barracks would foster and spread a militarism, which might become a stronghold for royalist and other anti-Parliament sympathies. The agitation included some jibes at engineers:^[76]

If this Military projector [Richmond] was not checked in his career, none could know what consequences might ensue. A Master General, with his Committee of Engineers, like the Laputan philosophers in their flying island might hover over the kingdom in an Ordnance balloon, descend in a moment, and seize on any man's house and domain. . ., draw out their scales and compasses, or sketch out their works. The country Gentlemen would find their terraces converted into bastions, their slopes into glacis,

[73] George III, The correspondence of King George the Third, from 1760 to December 1784 , John Fortescue, ed. (London: Macmillan and Co., 1927), 1 , 328–9.

[74] [James Glenie], A short essay on the modes of defence best adopted to the situation and circumstances of this island , 2d ed. (London, 1785); [Charles Lennox, Duke of Richmond] An answer to "A short essay. . ." (London, 1785); [James Glenie], A reply to the answer to a short essay . . . (London, 1785), and Observations on the Duke of Richmond's extensive plans of fortification (London, 1794). Cf. Alison Gilbert Olson, The radical Duke: Career and correspondence of Charles Lennox third Duke of Richmond (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), 81–6.

[75] An authentic account of the Debates in the House of Commons, on Monday, February 27, and Tuesday, February 28, 1786, on the proposed Plan for Fortifications, by His Grace the Duke of Richmond (London, 1786), 1–2, 20, 34, 56–7.

[76] An authentic account , 48.

their pleasure grounds into horn works and crown works to which they have hitherto borne an irreconcilable aversion.

Richmond returned from his defeat five years later with a new, subtler, and more successful scheme for militarization: the Ordnance Survey. In the words of one of Richmond's critics, the survey would provide essential information to "a resistance, which is not confined to particular spots, but is capable of operating every where."^[77] It also provided the British public with detailed information about their land: in 1801 the first one-inch map, of Kent, was published.

The work of Roy and of the Ordnance Survey won acclaim outside of Britain as a model of scientific accuracy, for example in India, where military surveying using Roy's methods began in 1802.^[78] It was above all the French who exported geodetically founded military cartography to the rest of Europe, by force as well as by example. Napoleonic military cartography was founded on the methods developed by Delambre and Méchain during the metric survey of 1792–8, and therefore also on the French experiences during the Paris-Greenwich triangulation. Delambre's formulas and Lenoir's repeating circle came to dominate French military cartography, and by 1810 "an army of astronomers armed with chronometers, telescopes, and sextants" had invaded Europe.^[79]

[77] [Glenie], A short essay , 30–1.

[78] Clements R. Markham, A Memoir on the Indian Surveys (London, 1878; reprinted Amsterdam: Meridian, 1968), 60–6; [Franz Xaver von Zach], "Ost-Indische Gradmessung, der Länge und Breite," Monatliche Correspondenz zur Beförderung der Erd- und Himmelskunde, 12 (1805), 485–94. Roy's measurement was praised by Delambre, for example, although at the Dépôt de la Guerre it appeared "dégénère en science purement spéculative." J.-B.-J. Delambre, Grandeur et figure de la terre (Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1912), 334–9; Delambre, Rapport historique , 74–5; "Des opérations géodesiques de détail," Mémorial topographique et militaire , an XI (1803), 1–56, 126.

[79] Delambre, Rapport historique , 77–8 ("une armée d'astronomes munis de chronomètres, de lunettes et de sextans"). General Nicolas Sanson, director of the Dépôt de la Guerre , prescribed the use of the repeating circle as well as the use of Delambre's mathematical methods. See Berthaud, Les ingénieurs géographes , 307; review of Sanson's "Instruction sur la disposition et la tenue des régistres de calculs géodesiques," Monatliche Correspondenz zur Beförderung der Erd- und Himmelskunde, 11 (1805), 49–66; Delambre, Rapport historique , 66. Cf. J.L. Heilbron, chap. 7 in this volume.

The French government had taken control of cartography in 1793 by expropriating the Cassini map; a quarter century later, it initiated a new survey, supervised by the general staff. The map of the Étatmajor (published 1833–81) deployed information and expertise assembled in the French army after more than a decade of military cartographic expansion.^[80] In 1801 Napoleon had started local Topographical Bureaus to extend the Carte de Cassini to the areas conquered by the French army; soon bureaus existed in Hanover, the Rhineland, Bavaria, Switzerland, Savoy, and Italy.^[81]

Austria set up similar services in 1806, and the Netherlands followed suit in 1816.^[82] In the same year, in response to its experience of French warfare, Russia founded a military cartographic organization that was to become the largest in Europe.^[83] The leader of the Franco-Italian Topographical Corps in Milano, the Swede Gustaf Wilhelm Tibell, founded a similar corps in Sweden in 1805, which made use of the technology imported from France for the remeasurement of Maupertuis' arc of meridian in Lapland in 1801–3.^[84] We see in Sweden the same interplay between military cartography and science-related geodesy that occurred earlier in Britain, and which recurred in Hanover in 1821–5 when a military survey took over Carl Friedrich Gauss' measurements.^[85]

Major Johann Jacob Baeyer, of the Prussian Army, was co-leader on Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel's famous survey of East Prussia in 1831–6; and Friedrich Georg Wilhelm Struve and general C. de

[80] Konvitz, Cartography in France , 59–61.

[81] Henri Marie Auguste Berthaut, Les ingénieurs géographes militaires 1624–1831: Étude historique (Paris: Service Géographique de l'Armée, 1902), 1 , 239–40, 305–431.

[82] See the collection La cartographie au XVIIIe siècle ; Frans Depuydt, "The large scale mapping of Belgium, 1800–1850," Imago mundi, 27 (1975), 21–4; Brown, The story of maps , 274–5.

[83] George M. Wheeler, Report upon the Third International Geographic Congress and Exhibition at Venice, Italy, 1881, accompanied by data concerning the principal government land and marine surveys of the world (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1885), 365–79.

[84] Ulla Ehrensvärd, "Fortifikationsofficeren som kartograf," in Bertil Runnberg, ed., Fortifikationen 350 år, 1635–1985 (Stockholm: Fortifikationskåren, 1986), 115–9.

[85] W. Grossmann, "Gauss' geodätische Tätigkeit im Rahmen zeitgenössischer Arbeiten," Zeitschrift für Vermessungswesen, 80 (1955), 371–84.

Tenner found what they called "the problem of their lives" in their measurement of a meridian of more than 25° (1816–55).^[86] Baeyer subsequently founded the Europäische Gradmessung , which met seventeen times between 1864 and 1912; it brought together astronomers, military cartographers, and civilian administrators to coordinate and promote geodetic measurements all over continental Europe.^[87] The twenty national cartographic organizations that existed in Europe and its colonies in 1885 were all under military direction.^[88] The cartographic situation paralleled the use of military manpower, technology, and administrative expertise in the construction of railroads and canals and in the development of mechanized industrial production.^[89]

As the store of geodetic data increased, the notion of a regular shape of the earth came into general doubt. The long-disputed ellipsoid had been put out of court by Delambre and Méchain, whose demonstration that meridians are irregular was corroborated by the Ordnance Survey in 1803.^[90] As more surveys comparable in

[86] Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel, Gradmessung in Ostpreussen und ihre Verbindung mit Preussischen und Russischen Dreiecksketten (Berlin, 1838), iv, ix–x; Friedrich Georg Wilhelm Struve, Arc du méridien de 25 × 20' entre le Danube et la Mer Glaciale (St. Petersburg, 1860), 1 , xv ("problème de leur vie").

[87] Of those participating in the meeting in 1867, twenty-four were directors of observatories or academics, eleven were military officers, and five were civilian administrators. See C. Bruhns, W. Foerster, and A. Hirsch, eds., Bericht über die Verhandlung der vom 30. September bis 7. October 1867 zu Berlin abgehaltenen allgemeinen Conferenz der Europäischen Gradmessung (Berlin, 1868), 3–4. Bialas, Erdgestalt , 242–6.

[88] Brown, The story of maps , 280–1.

[89] See, e.g., Merritt Roe Smith, "Introduction," in Merritt Roe Smith, ed., Military enterprise and technological change: Perspectives on the American experience (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1985), 1–37; and Barton C. Hacker and Sally L. Hacker, "Military institutions and the labor process: Noneconomic sources of technological change, women's subordination, and the organization of work," Technology and culture, 24:4 (1987), 743–75. Cf. Svante Lindqvist's and Robin Rider's contributions in this volume (chaps. 10 and 4, resp.).

[90] For example, see the report of the international commission that investigated the metric survey. Jan Hendrik van Swinden, "Rapport sur la mesure de la méridienne de France, et les résultats qui en ont été déduits pour déterminer les bases du nouveau systéme métrique," Institut national des sciences et arts, Mémoires , Sciences mathématiques et physiques, 2 (an VII), 47, 49–52. Several contributions from the heated debate concerning the British meridian are reprinted in Olinthus Gregory, Dissertations and letters. . .tending either to impugn or defend the Trigonometrical Survey of England and Wales (London, 1815). Delambre defended the British results; see Delambre, Grandeur et figure , 363–72.

magnitude to Delambre's and Méchain's were carried out and interconnected, the ellipsoid came to be viewed as a convenient fiction. The notion of the geoid, developed by Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel and Gauss around 1830 but not christened thus until 1873, became the preferred theoretical tool to describe the physical shape of the earth (or rather of the geopotential surface).^[91] The shape of the geoid could not be predicted; it had to be measured, over and over again, whenever instrumental improvements promised refinements. Increased data caused geometrical simplicity to give way to dynamic complexity, which could be managed only by the systematic work of well organized institutions like the military.

[91] Irene Fischer, "The figure of the earth—changes in concepts," Geophysical surveys, 2:1 (1975), 3–54, esp. 20–8; Bialas, Erdgestalt , 234–5.