How World War I launched mapmaking at National Geographic

In the summer of 1914, Americans began
reading news accounts of a conflict that would soon be called the
Great War—and that would draw the United States in three years
later. (See also: The
United States Enters World War I^[1]).

But it was National Geographic‘s maps that quickly helped
Americans grasp the sweep of a conflict so vast that it would later
become known as the First World War.

“People who followed the war at all followed it by reading
newspapers…and maps were a very important way to make sense of
these faraway places [and] strange names,” says Robert Poole, a
former executive editor at National Geographic magazine and
author of a book on
the history of the magazine^[2].

National Geographic revamped its August 1914 issue to
include a map of “New Balkan States and Central Europe,” which
featured the names of the places where fighting was most severe.
The maps were popular, boosting the organization’s visibility. By
year’s end, membership in the Society had grown 50 percent, to more
than 336,000.

The Balkans map was ready to go because the magazine’s editor,
Gilbert H.
Grosvenor^[3], had anticipated
heightened conflict after visiting Great Britain, France, and
Russia in the summer of 1913, during the Second Balkan War, and had
commissioned a map of the area.

By early 1914 the finished copies were delivered to the
Society’s Washington, D.C. headquarters. Waiting for the moment
when tensions were sufficiently high to pique reader interest,
Grosvenor stored the maps in the Society’s basement until war broke
out that summer.

"He had a sixth sense for what readers were interested
in," Poole says. "He could tell that something
important was happening in Europe, that Europe was changing very
quickly, that people needed this sort of information that they
weren’t getting anywhere else."

Although National Geographic is well known today for its maps
and atlases, the magazine did not actually create its own maps
during the first 27 years of its existence. (See also: 100
Years of National GeographicPull-Out Maps^[4].)

"Before 1915, the magazine had always gotten whatever
map supplements that it published from government agencies,
especially the USGS [U.S. Geological Survey]," says Mark
Jenkins, a former National Geographic archivist. "Whenever
they had money to produce a map, [Grosvenor] had to get his maps
done through an outside firm."

Grosvenor commissioned outside companies to produce both the
Balkans map and a 1915 follow-up map of the expanding war front.
However, Grosvenor’s disappointment with the initial drafts of the
war-front map, combined with the magazine’s increasing revenue, led
him to establish the map department in 1915—the first in-house
cartographic division at National Geographic.

"He thought [the outside companies] weren’t producing
what he wanted, and they weren’t doing it fast enough,"
Poole says. "He wanted to have quality control, and he
wanted to get maps when he needed them."

"WWI was an impetus for the creation of a cartographic
division here at National Geographic," says Juan Valdes,
the Society’s geographer and director of editorial and research.
"We started using different map projections to portray the
world in various ways. We introduced page maps to the magazine to
accompany the articles, so that people would know the exact places
that were being addressed in the text. It was the building block
for our 10th edition atlas [and] our world atlas app."

In the beginning, the maps department was, as Jenkins says,
"pretty much a one-man show." Albert Bumstead,
the map department’s first chief cartographer, was also its only
cartographer.

The department’s first map supplement was the 1918 "Map
of the Western Theatre of War," which provided readers
with the name and location of every town or hamlet that they would
likely encounter in reports from the front—a valuable resource to
readers unfamiliar with the vast territory covered by the war. (See
also: World
War I Soldiers Create Art in the Trenches.^[5])

The map’s place names were so comprehensive that the secretary
of the Geographic Society of France called it the most complete map
of the Western Front.

According to Valdes, the Western Theatre map "started
the tradition of that detailed mapping that we became known
for."

"That map set the tone for our cartographic
standards," Valdes says. "What National
Geographic could offer would be these detailed supplement maps that
weren’t that readily available to the public. What [the public] would normally see would be these small newspaper maps that
wouldn’t have a lot of detail."

Those war years marked a turning point for the Society—and for
the cartography field. "The mapmaking became much more
professional during and as a result of WWI," Poole says.
"People began to associate Nat Geo with cartographic
authenticity. They knew that they could go to National Geographic
for reliable info."

The development of mapmaking expertise during WWI laid the
foundation for the role that National Geographic would play in
WWII, when, as the New
York Times wrote in 1945^[6], the Society’s maps were
"to be found at the front, in the air, in our embassies
and consulates." Two weeks after the bombing of Pearl
Harbor, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s office requested a National
Geographic map showing where the Japanese had attacked in Southeast
Asia.

"National Geographic supplied the White House with
National Geographic maps for the White House map room,"
Poole says. "[FDR] would go over the maps with his chief
advisers, keep track of the action, what was happening in the war,
by following those maps.

"As the United States, the Soviet Union, and Britain
were deciding to carve up Europe, they used a National Geographic
map showing which parts of Germany would be the American sector,
which would be the British sector, which would be the Soviet
sector. They were actually using a National Geographic map to
decide what post-war Europe would look like."