31–40 of 47 posts
If anyone's particularly interested in unusual maps I'd recommend following @frankjacobs on Twitter. He's a collector of strange maps and tweets links to new posts on his blog. Enjoy https://twitter.com/frankjacobs http://bigthink.com/articles?blog=strange-maps
An important dimension missing in this type of map is cost of travel. If you are willing to spend sufficient money, my guess would be you could reach pretty much any spot of land on earth within about 48 hours, with the appropriate combination of helicopter and private jet... But if you limit yourself to, say, 2000 Euros, you could probably make it to many places, but it would take significantly longer.
The smallest unit listed - within 5 days journey - gives an interesting perspective on the world of travel at that time. What would we choose nowadays for an equivalent unit of "not worth listing anything below this?" Within an hour?
On a world scale, an hour wouldn't get you that far, it would be eaten up by travel to / from airport. For example Charing Cross (often used as a location for the centre of London) is about 30 minutes by train / 40 by car from Heathrow Airport according to Google.
Nice coincidence that it takes about 80 days to go around the world.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
On a world scale, an hour wouldn't get you that far, it would be eaten up by travel to / from airport. For example Charing Cross (often used as a location for the centre of London) is about 30 minutes by train / 40 by car from Heathrow Airport according to Google.
30 minutes on train from Charing Cross to Heathrow is a very optimistic estimate, I'd say 60 minutes (Picadilly line) would be more realistic.
(Heathrow Express is expensive compared to the Underground though, but if you were making this sort of map you'd probably use it as it's the faster service).
The smallest unit listed - within 5 days journey - gives an interesting perspective on the world of travel at that time. What would we choose nowadays for an equivalent unit of "not worth listing anything below this?" Within an hour?
Your next step up is 6 hours. Flight as above, plus one transfer (1 hour) and two more hours in the air, or 4 hours on one sector. So call it up to 2000 miles. Or by rail, between 500 miles (USA: DC to Boston by Acela) and 700 miles (Tokyo to Fukuoka by Shinkansen -- actually only 5 hours).
Longest options: I can get from Aberdeen (Scotland) to Wellington (New Zealand) in a little over 24 hours, and those are within a couple of hundred miles of being antipodal points on the globe.
To take much more than 48 hours you'd need at least one end point to be somewhere either in a war zone or at the wrong end of a thousand miles of dirt track -- Raqqa in Syria maybe, or somewhere in the arse end of the Congo or the Gobi Desert.
I think it's interesting that 100 years later, you could replace "days" with "hours" and the mail would look (roughly) the same. I wonder what the next 100 years will bring...
New York based isochronic map: http://quod.lib.umich.edu/g/genpub/abl7462.0001.001/390?view...