Google Earth offers many useful features to display historical views of the earth. One of them is David Rumsey’s extensive map collection.
Many may already be familiar with Google Earth’s timeline feature, which allows you to travel back in time using old satellite images. However, these aerial photographs date back as far as 1930 at the earliest, when photographs were first taken from airplanes. If that’s not enough, you have another option. Because Google Earth has a whole range of historical maps.
David Rumsey Map Collection
For this, Google Earth uses one of the largest map collections in the world: The David Rumsey Map Collection. The American Rumsey has been collecting maps since 1980, his collection now includes 150,000 copies, ranging from the 16th to the 21st century. The physical collection can be admired at Stanford University. However, soon two-thirds of the historical maps were already digitized and around 100 of them are turn integrated into Google Earth.
Historical map view in Google Earth
Among the 100 maps available, 4 cover the entire globe. One of them is dated 1812, two more in 1790. However, the oldest, earth-encompassing map dates from 1587. The Milanese Urbano Monte created them in 60 individual manuscripts, which together give a two-dimensional view of the earth starting from the North Pole. On Google Earth, however, this map can be admired in the form of a globe – with all its special features.
For example, Australia is still missing, even before that terra australis (Latin “southern country”) suspected, but was actually discovered only by the Dutchman Willem Janszoon in 1606. While the continents are generally mapped quite precisely and in great detail, Japan, for example, has a completely distorted shape and is far too close to North America.
In addition to the global specimens, many individual regions, countries and cities are also included in the historical map collection on Google Earth. The oldest city map is dated 1680 and shows old Tokyo – which today only comprises a tiny fraction of the mega-city.
The oldest German map in the collection is from 1844 and shows the Electorate of Hesse. A special feature of the map is that Kassel was still written as “Cassel” at the time.