These films have such a nostalgic feeling for me, as an old soul. It wasn’t really that long ago when maps were considered magical and surveyors and cartographers were wizards. We are so spoiled! But I could say that for every nostalgic video you’ve shared.
An interesting source of maps, and you can likely find one for your home town, are the Sanborn Insurance Maps. They made these up to 1977. The Library of Congress has scanned about a zillion of these. These were used by insurance companies and the maps show the streets and buildings with a lot of information about how the building was constructed from a fire risk point of view. Often, there are maps for various years so you can find buildings that are now gone and such. It can take some diligent searching, though. These were often in book form and online there might be many dozens of individual maps for the different areas of a town. But they seem to exist in section left to right, and then down. So, you can open one map and see where it is, and relative to where you want to be, got up or down from that point.
About map colors: It takes no more than four colors so that, no matter the shapes, no states or countries with the same color touch each other. This seemed to be a tough one to prove mathematically. It was finally proved in 1976 by Kenneth Appel and Wolfgang Haken. Some maps can be done with fewer than four colors. But many use more for expediency in designing the map especially considering the difficulty added that water areas all be the same color.
I used to like drawing maps in the elementary school, as well as reading maps that were around, analyzing streets, rivers and so on. Especially water fascinated me, and I sometimes went for a walk with my father down the whatever little river was around. My friend Aileen is fascinated with maps, geography and travelling, and she still likes drawing maps by hand.
Me too ! When I was little I loved to Searching where the source of big River started. The river that fascinating me is Le Loiret in Orleans, France. It's a resurgence from another river
We WERE the cartographer's house because of my little brother's fascination with maps and geography. He would plan out the routes to take on our family vacations and let neighbors see his maps for their travels.
_Is Colorado_ really _pink?_ 🤣 I think this is one of my favorites. Imagine just knocking on the door of your friendly neighborhood cartographer to borrow his toys for the day!
I used to buy county maps of my area to plan bike rides. In 93 I had a DeLorme US Atlas on CD. I haven't unfolded a map in a while. But there's one up on my wall.
I still keep paper bike maps for this reason. Along with a bike bag with a clear safe place to put the map and be able to still read it, even in the rain. You never know when the power on something will fail and you won't have google maps on your phone.
I've been in field service a long time, and my first territory was Los Angeles, when I'd grown up in the suburbs all my life. Aside from the culture shock, I depended heavily on Thomas Guides. You could find anything, including Wilshire and San Vicente in West Los Angeles, and Wilshire and the other San Vicente in the Miracle Mile part of Los Angeles! Shout out to the old Thomas Guide!
Great map tutorial. I use a topological map program on my cell phone that our 5-year old granddaughter like to look at. She is a little young but I'll show her this video, see if any of it makes sense to her. We are spoiled with GPS positioning on maps. My wife and I both keep dead tree road atlases in our cars as a backup and I find I have a hard time orientating myself on the small map view on the phone, much easier with a large paper page.
With a map and a compass I can navigate anywhere. The oldest map I have is of central Colorado from the 1960's (and yes, I've been through Leadville many times).
I sometimes hand-draw schematics for old, obscure guitar amps; those are a sort of road map! Perhaps the high-voltage supply should carry the warning "Beyond this place lie dragons!"🐉 🥺☠ ......They can certainly bite you, or burn you, if you're careless!
I've been tuning in to these (to Fran's Film Archive specifically) with my fourth-grader. I think the deliberate pace of these old films makes a really strong contrast with the modern frenetic wisecrack-a-minute all-singing all-dancing style of video. He pretty often finds them captivating. The narrator sounds like voiceover master Ken Nordine to me, and the internet tells me he did do some Coronet films, but I haven't been able to find any confirmation that he did this one. He would have been about 26 in 1946.
Another gem! Surprising to see colour in a 1946 education film, wonder where the budget for that came from? The cost over b&w would have been substantial.
It is fascinating to see how the Merkin pronunciation has changed. Route was pronounced properly, not "rowt". But "Aeroplane" was pronounced "airplane", even though many Merkin films of the time still use "Aeroplane". Here in UK map-reading, and mapping in general, are not taught much at school. This has adverse knock-on effects in science and maths, where mapping is an important concept.
It was a sign of the times when he mentioned that some of thing you read include "timetables". That would be railroad timetables. Passenger railroad travel was everywhere and touched almost every town large and small at that time. (There are also freight timetables, by the way, for railroad employees.) Amtrak stopped printing timetables in 2016 and most regionals long before that. They still have them online, however. Most timetables had quite a few little notations on them denoting all manner of things, so you really did need to learn how to read them.
I haven't seen a Coronet Film since the 1960's but remember they had some of the more interesting ones as far as my grade school 1960's opinion was concerned.
my grade school had a giant 4' x 8' 3D map of north america. vacuum formed and painted?..who knows but it was awesome. I got yelled at many times for running my fingers over the rockies...elevations have been greatly exaggerated to illustrate topography!
Yepper! I colored countries different colors to make it easier to see. It was gosh darn fun. And I still get hungry thinking of coloring the country that had that name. Read it and hear the narrator's voice!
Why do we rarely see map scales as a ratio? In Japan it's common to see them as 1:10000 or so. Thomas Brothers was half a mile to the inch. Street density looked about the same. But it's not! Quiz: what's Thomas Brothers scale as a ratio?
Not trying to nitpick but the copyright notice seems to indicate this is from 1956, not 1946. As always, thanks for posting this (as well as other gems!).
What kind of color film process is this? I remember old educational films that use this "two color" (reds and yellows) process, cheaper than true "full color" that feature films use, or is it old film stock that doesn't have the stability of Kodachrome? I found it ironic that they point out "the color blue on the maps shows lakes and rivers" when I could only see white on the film.
This is a faded Eastmancolor print, no doubt made years or decades after the film was originally produced. In 1946, the original would have been Kodachrome, but duplication was later done in Eastman color to save costs
I have a group of 16 mm educational films from the 1960's and 1970's that I collected years ago. I will dig them out of the closet and get the titles for you if you, I will gladly send them to you if you want them.
They just don’t teach this stuff anymore, and it’s a shame. I recently had a house built, and the guy doing the kitchen cabinets used CAD. I had brought him a paper copy of the floor plan, and he screwed up copying it into the computer. I went in to straighten things out, and I brought an architectural ruler. The guy had no idea how to use it and I had to do it myself.
And now you have GPS maps that will send you into bad neighborhoods or down streets that no longer exist or go the wrong way. If you have a motorhome, you might get sent under a low overpass to get your roof peeled off.
What an outdated video; don't they know they just have to shout at their phone and it will tell them where the nearest Miccy Dee's is. || Sarcasm of course, maps are awesome. Side question, when was the last time you saw a bimetalic strip dial thermostat? I can't find them online anymore.
These films have such a nostalgic feeling for me, as an old soul. It wasn’t really that long ago when maps were considered magical and surveyors and cartographers were wizards. We are so spoiled! But I could say that for every nostalgic video you’ve shared.
An interesting source of maps, and you can likely find one for your home town, are the Sanborn Insurance Maps. They made these up to 1977. The Library of Congress has scanned about a zillion of these. These were used by insurance companies and the maps show the streets and buildings with a lot of information about how the building was constructed from a fire risk point of view. Often, there are maps for various years so you can find buildings that are now gone and such. It can take some diligent searching, though. These were often in book form and online there might be many dozens of individual maps for the different areas of a town. But they seem to exist in section left to right, and then down. So, you can open one map and see where it is, and relative to where you want to be, got up or down from that point.
Thank you for the information, it's just what I've been looking for.
About map colors: It takes no more than four colors so that, no matter the shapes, no states or countries with the same color touch each other. This seemed to be a tough one to prove mathematically. It was finally proved in 1976 by Kenneth Appel and Wolfgang Haken. Some maps can be done with fewer than four colors. But many use more for expediency in designing the map especially considering the difficulty added that water areas all be the same color.
I used to like drawing maps in the elementary school, as well as reading maps that were around, analyzing streets, rivers and so on. Especially water fascinated me, and I sometimes went for a walk with my father down the whatever little river was around.
My friend Aileen is fascinated with maps, geography and travelling, and she still likes drawing maps by hand.
Me too ! When I was little I loved to Searching where the source of big River started. The river that fascinating me is Le Loiret in Orleans, France. It's a resurgence from another river
I have an old collection of DNR River Maps from when I used to canoe those rivers every weekend. You and your friend might enjoy getting some.
PS - They're usually free!
It was fun to watch as a land surveying engineer. Reminded me of school. Good times.
Love these windows into history you share! Fascinated every time
We WERE the cartographer's house because of my little brother's fascination with maps and geography. He would plan out the routes to take on our family vacations and let neighbors see his maps for their travels.
_Is Colorado_ really _pink?_ 🤣
I think this is one of my favorites. Imagine just knocking on the door of your friendly neighborhood cartographer to borrow his toys for the day!
My Dad taught me to read a map when I was 6, on one of those freebie gas station maps...
Coronet made a lot of the educational films I saw in school.
"A catographer is a person in your neighborhood, a person that you meet each day!"
I used to buy county maps of my area to plan bike rides.
In 93 I had a DeLorme US Atlas on CD.
I haven't unfolded a map in a while. But there's one up on my wall.
I still keep paper bike maps for this reason. Along with a bike bag with a clear safe place to put the map and be able to still read it, even in the rain. You never know when the power on something will fail and you won't have google maps on your phone.
Wouldn’t it be cool to have a bonafide map room like that one?
Now I have to go and build a map room. Dammit!
@@FranLab With a sand table. Standard kit for a map room!
I've been in field service a long time, and my first territory was Los Angeles, when I'd grown up in the suburbs all my life. Aside from the culture shock, I depended heavily on Thomas Guides. You could find anything, including Wilshire and San Vicente in West Los Angeles, and Wilshire and the other San Vicente in the Miracle Mile part of Los Angeles! Shout out to the old Thomas Guide!
Thank you Fran for showing us that old tutorial.
i still love maps and map making. I did the maps for the Marvel Comics Atlas.
Great map tutorial. I use a topological map program on my cell phone that our 5-year old granddaughter like to look at. She is a little young but I'll show her this video, see if any of it makes sense to her.
We are spoiled with GPS positioning on maps. My wife and I both keep dead tree road atlases in our cars as a backup and I find I have a hard time orientating myself on the small map view on the phone, much easier with a large paper page.
With a map and a compass I can navigate anywhere. The oldest map I have is of central Colorado from the 1960's (and yes, I've been through Leadville many times).
Leadville is still a nice place to go camping.
I sometimes hand-draw schematics for old, obscure guitar amps; those are a sort of road map! Perhaps the high-voltage supply should carry the warning "Beyond this place lie dragons!"🐉 🥺☠ ......They can certainly bite you, or burn you, if you're careless!
I love maps, I have local ones dating back over 300 years, I then go out to find the missing villages roads mines etc.
Great metal detecting prospects could be a whole yt channel
I've been tuning in to these (to Fran's Film Archive specifically) with my fourth-grader. I think the deliberate pace of these old films makes a really strong contrast with the modern frenetic wisecrack-a-minute all-singing all-dancing style of video. He pretty often finds them captivating.
The narrator sounds like voiceover master Ken Nordine to me, and the internet tells me he did do some Coronet films, but I haven't been able to find any confirmation that he did this one. He would have been about 26 in 1946.
"But there is no joy in Leadville"......because it's a Superfund site now.
Another gem! Surprising to see colour in a 1946 education film, wonder where the budget for that came from? The cost over b&w would have been substantial.
Sure brings back memories for me.
Me, too. Orienteering in Scouts.
It is fascinating to see how the Merkin pronunciation has changed. Route was pronounced properly, not "rowt". But "Aeroplane" was pronounced "airplane", even though many Merkin films of the time still use "Aeroplane".
Here in UK map-reading, and mapping in general, are not taught much at school. This has adverse knock-on effects in science and maths, where mapping is an important concept.
i grew up with an road atlas about 3 feet tall 2 ft wide , every state outlined with its thousands of roads always fascinated me
Great video!! I love maps too and have been a fan since childhoood, using the HM Gousha maps to navigate on our family trips.
It was a sign of the times when he mentioned that some of thing you read include "timetables". That would be railroad timetables. Passenger railroad travel was everywhere and touched almost every town large and small at that time. (There are also freight timetables, by the way, for railroad employees.) Amtrak stopped printing timetables in 2016 and most regionals long before that. They still have them online, however. Most timetables had quite a few little notations on them denoting all manner of things, so you really did need to learn how to read them.
I remember seeing this in third grade in perhaps ‘89. I think my school was slow in adopting newer technologies.
I kept looking for coordinates which are often found on maps.
Mark Monmonier approves this message.
Open Street Map allows you to play Cartographer also, but of course doesn't have those cool paper rolldown map layers.
Before the computer there was Sand Table 💀💀
I haven't seen a Coronet Film since the 1960's but remember they had some of the more interesting ones as far as my grade school 1960's opinion was concerned.
my grade school had a giant 4' x 8' 3D map of north america. vacuum formed and painted?..who knows but it was awesome. I got yelled at many times for running my fingers over the rockies...elevations have been greatly exaggerated to illustrate topography!
Is the sand table a real thing as a layout tool? Wouldn't a chalkboard allow more precise temporary drawing and be less messy?
Oh my goodness....where are you getting this stuff Fran!! :D
I wonder if they still teach orienteering at school? That was something I enjoyed.
Well how ‘bout that, maps ARE fun! I still keep a US Road Atlas in my Subaru, it’s kind of neat to look at plus you never know!
Yepper! I colored countries different colors to make it easier to see. It was gosh darn fun. And I still get hungry thinking of coloring the country that had that name. Read it and hear the narrator's voice!
Another good one!
Why do we rarely see map scales as a ratio? In Japan it's common to see them as 1:10000 or so. Thomas Brothers was half a mile to the inch. Street density looked about the same. But it's not! Quiz: what's Thomas Brothers scale as a ratio?
Not trying to nitpick but the copyright notice seems to indicate this is from 1956, not 1946. As always, thanks for posting this (as well as other gems!).
XLVI (50-10)(5+1)=46 😜
What kind of color film process is this? I remember old educational films that use this "two color" (reds and yellows) process, cheaper than true "full color" that feature films use, or is it old film stock that doesn't have the stability of Kodachrome? I found it ironic that they point out "the color blue on the maps shows lakes and rivers" when I could only see white on the film.
This is a faded Eastmancolor print, no doubt made years or decades after the film was originally produced. In 1946, the original would have been Kodachrome, but duplication was later done in Eastman color to save costs
Hello from Colorado.
I love paper maps.
Everyone has a sand table, don't you?
the good ol days when kids could go outside , and old dudes could teach em stuff. nowadays both are frowned upon
I have a group of 16 mm educational films from the 1960's and 1970's that I collected years ago. I will dig them out of the closet and get the titles for you if you, I will gladly send them to you if you want them.
They just don’t teach this stuff anymore, and it’s a shame. I recently had a house built, and the guy doing the kitchen cabinets used CAD. I had brought him a paper copy of the floor plan, and he screwed up copying it into the computer. I went in to straighten things out, and I brought an architectural ruler. The guy had no idea how to use it and I had to do it myself.
And now you have GPS maps that will send you into bad neighborhoods or down streets that no longer exist or go the wrong way. If you have a motorhome, you might get sent under a low overpass to get your roof peeled off.
What an outdated video; don't they know they just have to shout at their phone and it will tell them where the nearest Miccy Dee's is. || Sarcasm of course, maps are awesome. Side question, when was the last time you saw a bimetalic strip dial thermostat? I can't find them online anymore.
Bimetal thermostats contain a liquid mercury switch, so they don't sell them anymore.
Just walked past a bimetalic strip dial thermost and it's set to 18C . No mercury in it. UK thermostats switch 240V AC mains.
Wow, Biden looked old back in 1947. He looks almost exactly the same these days.