Cahill-Keyes Megamap prototypes

Cahill 1909

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Cahill-Keyes M-layout world map silhouette including Antarctica

Cahill-Keyes 1975

Photos of the Cahill-Keyes Megamap Prototypes

Gene Keyes
2009-12-26

Explanatory note:

From 1975 to 1984 I did much preliminary calculation and design work toward a Cahill-Keyes 1/1,000,000 Megamap. I also executed by hand numerous drafts and prototypes.

Due to personal exigencies, the project was mothballed in 1984. Now that I am retired, and have a website, a 1998 Mac, and an HP scanner, I've begun to salvage some of that material — part of my effort to publicize the world map designs of B.J.S Cahill (1866-1944), the progenitor of my own mapwork.

Below are some photos showing early stages of the Megamap endeavor. As I mentioned elsewhere, my "Coherent World Map System" concept may be moot, but I think these notes and pictures warrant some space on the Web, rather than just languishing in my files.

Closely related to this page are the following papers of mine:

"Ten Principles for a Coherent World Map System"

"Geocells and the Megamap"

"Notes on Scaling Cahill and Cahill-Keyes Maps"

"Notes on Re-desiging B.J.S. Cahill's Butterfly World Map"

"Evolution of the Dymaxion Map: An Illustrated History and Critique"
(and see especially Part 9.2, "Total Irregularity of [its] Graticule"

Tags: B.J.S. Cahill, Cahill-Keyes, Megamap, cartography, Coherent World Map System, geocells, graticule, world map, Butterfly Map, "Real-World Map", 1/1,000,000, 1/10,000,000, 1/20,000,000, world map design

Fig. 1: This is a hand-drawn 1 x 2 meter wall map prototype, scale 1/20,000,000, with 1° geocells. and a specimen detachable panel of the U.S. (see next picture). [Drafts here are incomplete, and also do not yet include Antarctica re-joined to the South America octant, nor the Kamchatka peninsula rejoined to Russia. See small map at top right of page.]

Fig. 2. Attachable / detachable panel on the hand-drawn working draft of the 1/20,000,000 master map profile. Essence of the Coherent World Map System is for any of its sub-maps, at any of its sizes or scales, to be a square cut-out, enlarged or reduced, from the all-encompassing Megamap.

Fig. 3. Megamap simulation: this is the same 1/20,000,000 wall map prototype as above, but seen from the end. Figurines indicate size of people walking on a floor layout of the 1/1.000.000 Megamap. Accentuated grid lines represent panels of one square meter each. Notice the proportionality of the one-degree geocells to each other, a crucial design factor of the Cahill-Keyes "Real-World" map. However, the template in Fig. 4 below is more accurately drawn.

Fig. 4. A more precise rendition, but hand drawn, of a single octant template for a Cahill-Keyes map at 1/10,000,000, twice the scale as above. A complete wall map at that size would be 2 x 4 meters. As before, accented grid lines represent one-square-meter panels of the Megamap.

Fig. 5. Tip of the iceberg of a single octant template for the Megamap: here, four meter-square sheets on a wall. (The dark borders are not part of the map, but only mounting tape seen through the thin K&E millimeter-grid drafting paper.) On wall to left is a hand-plotted square-meter specimen of the Megamap: Canada's Atlantic provinces.

Fig. 6. Bigger tip of the iceberg: 16 meter-square panels of the Megamap graticule template, arrayed on a classroom floor. (A finished Megamap would be for a gym, a plaza, or a museum, etc.) In foreground is removable specimen sheet of Canada's Maritime provinces, where they would appear in the Megamap. Notice again the proportionality of all adjoining one-degree geocells.

Fig 7. Another view of the Megamap's 16-panel assembly prototype, toward a template for the graticule, with a closer view of the Maritime provinces outtake. A single octant would be 62 square meters. The 20 x 40 meter Megamap comprises 800 square meters, but the graticule and geographic contents only occupy 496 of those square-meter panels; the rest are backdrop. The square accent lines now enclose a grid of 200 x 200 mm, where each millimeter represents a kilometer: i.e., a 1/1,000,000 map. These panels were hand-drafted in pencil, using x-y coordinates manually compiled from a Sharp EL-515 calculator, and others output with a BASIC program.

For a half-size image click in it once at upper left; to restore full size, click in it twice.
Maritime provinces specimen panel from a prototype Mega-map template graticule

Maritime provinces specimen panel from a prototype Mega-map template graticule

Fig. 8. Three versions of the Canada's Atlantic provinces at 1/1,000,000:

Left: Splice of 2 sheets from the International Map of the World (IMW);

Center: Landsat mosaic (Ottawa: Dept. of Energy, Mines and Resources);

Right: One square meter preview panel of Cahill-Keyes Megamap. (Note: it is not a tracing, but a painstaking mathematical compression compiled by hand from the IMW.) A smaller 400 x 400 mm frame of this is seen in Figs. 6 and 7; and the one-meter version is also seen in color in Fig. 5.

For a half-size image click in it once at upper left; to restore full size, click in it twice.
3 versions of Atlantic provinces at 1/1,000,000

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