In celebration of the man who brought clarity to the chaos of navigating our cities

This is Harry Beck. If you've ever used public transportation in almost any major city in the world you probably owe him a little debt of gratitude.

This is London in 1862. The world's first underground railway is being tested by the great and the good of the capital (including four-time Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone) in advance of it being opened to the public on 10 January 1863.

Lit by gaslight and powered by steam, the train travels the c.4-mile journey from Paddington to Farringdon Street and back again.

(Note that although technology in 2017 is now very different, ways of dressing in London remain pretty much unchanged.)

The Metropolitan Railway, as it was then known, proves an ingenious way of travelling across a busy, crowded city and soon new underground lines are popping up (down?) all over London. While the modern system is now publicly owned, this was not fully the case until 1948. The early explosion of lines was driven by private companies speculating on which routes might prove popular, not all of which proved successful.

The map above, from 1908, was the first map issued of all lines. It was also the first time that the London-wide network was named "UNDERGROUND" in stations, a name chosen (*checks wikipedia*) because the trains ran underground!

1908 was particularly significant for the tube, with the launch of the iconic "roundel" symbol and the first electronic ticketing machines launched in stations as well.

Unfortunately, although broadly geographically accurate, maps like that from 1908 or even 1932 above, have a number of inherent problems.

For example, city centres tend to have lots of stations relatively close together. Showing all these accurately, especially in a latticework of interconnections, as well as identifying station names clearly, is almost impossible. The 1908 map has station names crammed in at varying angles or even bending around lines.

The 1932 version shows a different problem - the expansion of lines to the suburbs of London means you have lots of dead space on maps in all directions just to show the few outer stations at the end of lines.

(Incidentally, few of these suburban stations are actually underground. In fact, only 45% of the modern Underground network is underground.)

In 1926, a talented draughtsman named Fred Stingemore had attempted to address this problem by standardising the gaps between stations. This improves the problem at the outskirts of the city, but not necessarily in the centre where the issue is not so much space as the criss-crossing of lines hindering legibility.

The centre of the map remains a dense cluster, not helped by the close proximity of stations opened by rival companies. For example, the stations of Holborn and British Museum were less than 100 yards from each other.

(The latter station closed for good in 1933, which may or may not have been related to the rumours that it was (still is?) haunted by the ghost of the daughter of an Egyptian Pharaoh called Amen-ra who apparently screamed so loudly that the noise would carry down the tunnels to adjoining stations.)

The genius of fellow draughtsman Harry Beck was to blend the principles of standardisation introduced by Stingemore with the simplicity he admired in electrical wiring diagrams. In particular, lines would no longer attempt to accurately represent their exact geographical location, but be limited to vertical, horizontal or standard 45° angles.

Beck's first sketch of this new concept, from 1931, is already instantly recognisable.

In true British style, Beck's diagram (he was never happy with it being called a "map") was deemed to be too radical and resisted until 1932 when a trial run of just 500 copies was printed. They were well-received by passengers, leading to a much larger print run of 700,000 copies in 1933 (given out as foldable pocket maps as seen above).

The new diagram was a revelation to Londoners. All 700,000 copies had been picked up by the end of the month and, while it has been revised many times since, Beck's design has effectively been the main way of helping us navigate the tube ever since.

Sadly, although he was responsible for one of the most recognisable and influential pieces of 20th-century design, Beck's personal story did not have a particularly happy ending. As he was never officially commissioned to work on his design, he received only a token payment of 5 or 10 guineas (no official record exists) for his work and his superiorsinstantly took over control of it.

Others were allowed to develop the design - occasionally successfully but sometimes disastrously - against his wishes. Beck himself continued to plot improvements to the design in his own home, none of which would ever be used, until his death in 1974. He even designed diagrams for the Paris Metro system, seemingly just as a personal project.

The London Underground system continues to grow and grow, making Beck's innovation ever more significant. Meanwhile, his introduction of the "topological map" style has since influenced the way almost all major city transit systems are depicted. Without him, it's debatable whether public transport would be anywhere near as popular or accessible as it can be (at its best).

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TL;DR: Englishman turns muddled transport map into crystal-clear diagram - London loves it and the rest of the world copies it.

GOLD STAR for anyone that can name the city that had the world's second underground railway system after London without looking it up.

Further reading:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Beck

https://londonist.com/2016/05/the-history-of-the-tube-map

https://tfl.gov.uk/corporate/about-tfl/culture-and-heritage/londons-transport-a-history/london-underground/a-brief-history-of-the-underground
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Previous "In Celebration Ofs..."

1) ... some truly bonkers postmodern architecture now lost: http://imgur.com/gallery/Y6AsZ
2) ... a brilliant Frenchwoman, an artistic genius full of mischief (and menace?): https://imgur.com/gallery/IWDdu