Web page Via a Nineteenth-Century Embossed U.S. Atlas Designed with Touchable Cartography for Blind College students

A few decade after French educator Louis Braille invented the eponymous system for blind and sight-impaired readers, the New England Establishment for Training of the Blind launched its personal embossed designs permitting these with low or no imaginative and prescient entry to vital info. Below the management of Samuel Gridley Howe, the college, which is now the Perkins Faculty for the Blind, acquired a printing press in 1835 and commenced to create quite a lot of studying supplies with raised writing for its college students. A kind of books was an atlas of the US, which held touchable cartography inside its pages.

Paired with descriptions written in normal Latin script—this proved rather more troublesome to learn than braille and by no means gained the recognition of its counterpart—the maps comprise typical info like longitude and latitude, together with the realm’s inhabitants, local weather, and commerce. Strong strains denote rivers, a singular raised shoreline buttressed by parallel strains represents oceans, and clustered triangles are mountains. Printed in 1837 in an version of fifty, this model of the atlas comprises simply 24 states. Solely 4 copies are identified to stay.

Flip by way of digital scans of the guide at David Rumsey Map Associates. (through Kottke)

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