Nothing melds art and science like a map. This regular column by Pioneer Works alum and advisor Joshua Jelly-Schapiro, illuminating some of Jelly-Schapiro’s favorite maps from history, explores cartography's power to mold our minds and move our feet.

Maps are nothing if not perspectival. This is Lesson One, or should be, in Cartographic Literacy 101. Every map squashes our three-dimensional world onto a two-dimensional plane. Every map, whether it charts a nation’s borders or where to get dinner, betrays a point of view. This is key to how, as abstractions of the real, they work: by helping us envision the world’s places, and how they relate in space, with the help not of a few cartographic conventions we’ve internalized from the map-makers of early modern Europe (among them making North “up,” and picturing the earth’s surface from directly above).

But there’s a larger and even more basic fact about maps, remarked upon less often, that’s suggested by these words—"perspective,” “envision,” “picture”—and which we’d do well to consider: maps, like the way we usually conceive of geography in general, are a media predicated on sight.

Because our eyes, of course, are just one the organs by which we experience our planet, and attach memories and meaning to its places. We also do this with our ears and digits and tastebuds, and our noses, too. And recognizing geography’s traditional tying to visual perception, in how it has sought to model and help us understand the world, prompts a fascinating question: what might maps created for those without the capacity for sight look—or perhaps more to the point, feel—like?

One astonishing answer lies in this Atlas of the United States Printed for the Use of the Blind, from 1837, in which this chart of Maine appears alongside similar maps—their mountains rendered as cross-hatched ridges, their edges as strands of dots—of twenty-four states.

Published in Boston by the New England Institute for the Education of the Blind, this volume  contained the first paper maps, according to its makers, intended to be used by the blind “unassisted by a seeing person.” It’s also a book about which people knew until David Rumsey, perhaps America’s greatest map collector—and the owner of one of just four extant copies of the Atlas (out of 50 originally printed)—uploaded hi-res photographs of its pages to his website. Rumsey has spent the past couple of decades turning his astonishing collection—which numbers some 150,000 pieces of cartographia, and which he recently donated to Stanford University—into hi-res digital images available for perusal and permission-free use, by anyone on the internet, with a care typified by his photographers’ lighting of this atlas’s embossed pages from the side, so that we can glean their ridges.

These pages’ original creator, Samuel Gridley Howe, was a prominent Boston progressive and the husband of Julia Ward Howe, a prominent abolitionist who won fame, during the Civil War, for penning “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Sam Howe’s chosen battles, as director of the school which later became the Perkins Institute (which remains a leader in educating the visually impaired to this day), seem to have involved seeking ever more ways to help the blind, as he put it in his introduction to this Atlas, “have all amelioration to their condition which human ingenuity, prompted by benevolence, can effect.” In 1835, he acquired a printing press for the school. Then he busied himself perfecting a technique for producing “tactile books” whose words were comprised not of ink but raised bumps of paper. Braille had been invented in 1825, but it wasn’t yet in wide use. The books that Howe and his associates produced in Boston—among them a complete text of the New Testament, a Universal History, and textbooks on grammar, geography, and spelling—utilized an all-lower-case alphabet of embossed Roman letters, with a few adjustments for unsighted readers (note here the upper-case-like shape of letters—g, p, y—which in lower-case would have descenders).

Similar adjustments were made to the atlas’s maps by their chief designer, Howe’s friend Stephen P. Ruggles. Every cartographer knows that making a good map, like telling a good story, is as much about what one chooses to leave out as what one includes. But Ruggles seems to have well-gleaned that this onus of simplification—the need to include only “principle features” (Maine’s Penobscot and Kennebec Rivers are included here; its Saco and Allagash are not)—is only heightened in a map of the blind. Its legibility depends on maintaining plenty of blank space between its raised lines (and, here, on an accompanying text which explains for its intended users that the Penobscot and Kennebec are labeled with the abbreviations “P.R.” and “K.R.,” respectively).

As to how and whether those intended users found enjoyment and edification from Howe’s and Ruggles’ maps, we’ll have to take Howe’s word for it that his school’s students “soon understood [what] sheets of stiff pasteboard, marked by certain crooked lines, represented …[and] were delighted to go on with tireless curiosity.” The fact that similar maps didn’t grow widespread is perhaps most attributable to the cost and complexity of their making. It may also have to do with the truth that the mental effort required to ingest such charts by touch, as one scholar recently explained, in describing the sum of memory it takes to stitch those impressions into a coherent map, is akin to a sighted person “looking through a soda straw and moving it around [to try and] figure out its layout.”

But the context of that last remark—an article hailing a new map of Switzerland for its cantons’ blind, and the pleasure with which they met it—speaks to an apparent resurgence, of late, in map-making for the visually impaired. So does an ambitious new atlas of India, for that vast nation’s 50 million citizens who are blind. It’s striking, in examining its contents, to note their resemblance in form to Howe’s maps from 1837—and their distinctions. The Indian atlases maps, like that Swiss one, of course, don’t employ Howe’s now-outmoded embossments to convey their contents in Hindi, English, Gujarati, and Telugu: they use Braille. ♦