Jay Foreman

then it has to make important decisions about what detail to leave out.

And probably the best examples of these are metro maps, maps of train and bus systems around the world.

So one of the most famous is the London Underground.

It was designed in 1932 by an engineer called Harry Beck, and what he famously did was he decided to completely do away with the concept of scale.

And his map showed simply where the stations were, in what order,

where the changes were between lines, and what you ended up with was something that looked more like a circuit diagram.

As far as accuracy goes, it's absolutely dreadful, but as far as it being useful for knowing where to get your train, it was revolutionary.

And that's just one extreme example, but really every single map you look at does exactly the same thing, and it has to do some kind of distortion

There were so in the US throughout most of the 20th century, there were three major companies that did the vast majority of maps in the US.

And one of them was Rand McNally.

The other one was General Drafting.

The third one, I actually can't remember right now what the third one is called.

But there was not only did they have a

I suppose the word is triopoly on the maps produced in the US.

But there was a massive rivalry between them as well.

And the fascinating story about how one was very nearly caught copying the other.

And it caused all sorts of hilarious consequences.

This is one of the things that we found when we were researching our book is that there was a spectacular story from the 50s.

of Rand McNally inventing a town specifically for the purpose of avoiding somebody copying their map.

But what happened was somebody else saw this fake town that was called Aglo, built a store on the site where there was nothing there, and seeing on the map that there was this place apparently called Aglo, they decided to name it the Aglo General Store.