An Encyclopedia of the History of Technology part 48 doc

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The year after the Act was repealed, Frederick and George Lanchester built
the first all-British car, with pneumatic tyres, Ackermann steering and drive,
through an epicyclic gearbox, to a rear axle with a differential gear. Lanchester
was also the first to develop disc brakes in 1901. An important entrant into the
field was Henry Royce, a Manchester crane-maker who, with the Hon.
Charles S.Rolls, built three 7.5kW (10hp), two-cylinder cars in 1905. Two
years later the 30–37.5kW (40–50hp) ‘Silver Ghost’ Rolls Royce appeared,
shortly to be accepted as the finest car in the world, eagerly sought after by
potentates, princes and premiers of every race, colour and creed, a coveted
position that the marque has held to this day.
Across the Atlantic inventors and manufacturers were just as active as those
in Europe. In August 1859 Edwin L.Drake had struck oil in Pennsylvania at a
depth of 69 1/2 feet (21m), starting an industry which, in fifteen years, reached
a production of 10 million barrels, each of 360lb (163kg), per day. Initially
most of this was used for lamp oil but it was to form a useful source of motor
fuel in the future. By 1982, 250,000 million 36-gallon (43.2 US, 163.7l) barrels
of oil had been extracted by the world’s oil industry.
Henry Ford ran his first ‘horseless carriage’ through the streets of Detroit in
1896. The Ford Motor Company built six hundred cars at the first mass
production car plant at Dearborn, Michigan, in 1903, and built the first of his
famous Model T series in 1908, producing 19,000 in that year and 1.25
million by 1920. By 1927 over 15 million had been built, a record in
production only to be surpassed by the Volkswagen Beetle of Ferdinand
Porsche forty-five years later. The adoption of Ford’s mass production
techniques in Europe started with the Citroën Type A in 1919.
An important adjunct to the car industry was in the electrical components,
in which Bosch, Delco and Lucas predominated, all producing complete
electrical systems including headlights by 1911 when Austro-Daimler also
offered electric starting as an optional extra, a year before Cadillac installed it

as standard. Duesenberg had mechanical four-wheel brakes in 1910 and the
first hydraulic brakes on all four wheels originated from the same company in
1920. Triumph led the way with them in Britain five years later. The first entry
of the American industry into Europe was in 1924 when General Motors took
over the German Opel works. The same year they were producing 100 of their
Tree-Frog model a day. Paralleling Ford’s oft-quoted dictum about the model
T, ‘You can have it in any colour you like as long as it’s black’, the Opel Tree-
Frog was only available in green. The first series-produced front-wheel drive
car in the world, the Alvis 12/75, appeared in 1928.
The 1930s saw the introduction of the fully synchromesh gearbox, patented
by the German component company ZF and first fitted by Alvis to their Speed
20 of 1933. Sir William Morris, later Lord Nuffield, set his sights on producing
a British ‘people’s car’ for under £100 and launched the Morris Cowley in
1931. His competitor, Herbert Austin, came out with the inexpensive ‘Baby’
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Austin 7 about the same time. Ford, which had started building cars at
Trafford Park in Manchester in 1911, was, by 1931, producing 500 vehicles a
day from its new plant at Dagenham, Essex. They started production of their
£100 Ford Popular in 1933.
The ‘Baby’ Austin was to be the start of the Japanese motor car industry,
for in 1935 Datsun started to manufacture it under licence. This firm was to
become Nissan-Datsun under the ownership of the Nippon Steel Company.
Today with their competitors—Honda, Toyota, Subaru, Mazda, Mitsubishi,
Suzuki and Daihatsu—the Japanese motor car industry is the largest in the
world, producing over 7 million vehicles a year. Volume production owes
much to the use of industrial robots for, of some 10,000 in the world, over
4000 are at work in Japan and over two-thirds of these are in the automobile
industry. This achievement is all the more remarkable in the light of the fact
that the first Japanese-designed car was built by Toyota as recently as 1955,

while motorcycle manufacturer Honda did not produce a car or commercial
vehicle until 1962.
Also in 1955, in France, Citroën introduced their revolutionary design the
GS 19, with a hydraulic system so comprehensive and so complex that many
dealers were reluctant to handle it, predicting that it would not sell, while
service garages were equally hesitant to dabble in the unknown mysteries of
hydraulics. The car had hydro-pneumatic suspension that could be adjusted to
accommodate different loads and road conditions, hydraulically assisted
braking, steering and gear change as well as a glass fibre roof and a single-
spoke steering wheel. The prophets of gloom were wrong. It did sell and the
same principles have been applied to subsequent models. Opposing the trend
towards the increased use of hydraulics, the Dutch manufacturers DAF
developed a continuously variable mechanical automatic transmission, the
‘Variomatic’ belt drive, launched in 1958. The following year, BMC, as it then
was, ushered in a new era of cheaper motoring with Alec Issigonis’s
transverseengined Mini with front-wheel drive, in which four passengers could
be accommodated within a body no more than 3.09m long.
AUTOMOTIVE ENGINES
As related elsewhere (see Chapter 5), the steam engine was the first
thermodynamic form of power, used originally for mine pumping by
Savery and Newcomen and producing rotary motion when Watt added his
sun-and-planet gearing in 1783. Even before this the minds of many
ingenious men had turned towards propelling ships and carriages, the two
forms of transport then in use, by engines. Jonathan Hulls published his
proposals for marine propulsion in 1737, Nicolas Cugnot built his steam-
driven gun carriage in 1770. It was not until the advent of ‘strong steam’,
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i.e. steam at high pressure, that the steam engine became light enough and
small enough to be useful as a mobile engine, Richard Trevithick, Sir

Goldsworthy Gurney, Thomas Hancock, William Murdock and William
Symington were among the most notable pioneers of steam-driven road
transport (see p. 458).
The introduction of the gas engine, first by Etienne Lenoir in 1860, and
then the development of the four-stroke cycle by Nikolaus Otto in 1876, came
at a time when road transport was in a decline in opposition to the success of
the railways which were sweeping many lands. William D.Priestman built the
first successful oil engine in 1886 and Herbert Ackroyd Stuart developed it
further with hot-bulb ignition. Rudolf Diesel had studied under Professor Carl
von Linde who had shown him a cigar lighter based on the principle of the
Malayan fire piston, in which rapid compression of a gas generated sufficient
heat to cause it to explode or ignite. Thus was born the idea of compression-
ignition, successfully translated into a practical vehicle engine at the
Maschinenfabrik Augsburg AG in 1893, the prototype of the diesel engine, one
of the two principal types used in road vehicles today.
The petrol engine, like the oil engine, developed from the original gas
engine. It differs from gas and oil engines in that liquid fuel is vaporized before
it reaches the combustion chamber and that it is light enough to vaporize at
atmospheric pressure and temperature. The first inventor was Samuel Moray
who experimented with such an engine, using a mixture of alcohol and
turpentine, at Orford, New Hampshire, USA, between 1826 and 1829. Otto’s
partner, Eugen Langen, had in fact heard of the use of petroleum residue by
Siegfried Marcus, and went so far as to try to propel a tramcar on the same
principle in Liège by a gas engine.
It was, however, the Germans, Daimler and Benz, who produced the first
successful petrol engines, both incorporating their engines into practical road
vehicles. Daimler was greatly assisted by Wilhelm Maybach who developed
the surface carburettor and subsequently the spray type, efficient atomization
of the liquid fuel being an essential feature of the petrol engine.
The four-stroke cycle (suction, compression, power and exhaust) could be

considered wasteful, having only one power stroke for every two revolutions of
the crankshaft. On the other hand, the stroke that preceded the ignition stroke
was devoted to compression of the explosive mixture, the lack of which had
made earlier engines, such as those of Lenoir, inefficient. In 1880 Sir Dugald
Clerk devised a two-stroke cycle in which the cylinder is exhausted at the end
of the expansion stroke and a new charge admitted at the start of the
compression stroke, a low pressure pump being required for this. Increasing
the pressure, which Clerk did some ten years later, in effect initiated the
concept of supercharging. Two-stroke and four-stroke engines have since co-
existed, each filling a useful place in the scheme and neither proving to have an
overall superiority.
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Just as the increased cost of fodder and the rising price of horses during the
Napoleonic War gave a fillip to the development of the steam carriage, so did
the oil crisis of 1973 encourage designers to save petrol and to try to develop
engines which would run on alternative fuels such as methyl, ethyl and
hydrogen. None reverted to the roof-mounted balloon gas tanks that became a
feature of motoring during the Second World War and little success was
achieved. However, as the world’s petroleum resources are undoubtedly finite,
a reversion to these experiments may well come about towards the end of the
century. ‘Lean burn’ engines which use a lower octane petrol and some 10–15
per cent less of it have been developed so far by Austin Rover and Ford in
Britain. They are based on an American system using a three-way catalytic
converter and fuel injection system. The further development of fuel cells is
likely, as well as the production of efficient light-weight batteries for electrically-
propelled town runabouts.
Experiments to improve on the conventional internal combustion engine
and its efficiency have been a constant preoccupation of engineers in the
automobile industry since the days of Daimler, Benz and Diesel. There have

also been spasmodic attempts to design a petrol or oil engine that does not
conform to the orthodox internal combusion engine configuration. The most
notable of these are the Rover gas turbine and the Wankel engine, the latter
having made some impact on the commercial market.
The Rover gas turbine motor car, the first in the world, made its appearance
in 1950. Based on a standard Rover 75 converted to a two-seater open body,
the car was powered by a twin-shaft Rover T8 gas turbine developing 200hp at
40,000 compressor rpm driving the rear axle through a 6:1 helical reduction
gear. It was started by an electric motor of 12 volts which rotated the
compressor shaft and also supplied the ignition plug in the combustion
chamber, the trembler coil and the batteries, but which cut out when the
turbine was running. The fuel was paraffin. In 1952 it reached a speed of
nearly 245kph (152mph) a world record for this type of car. The 1.2 tonne car
could reach 160kph (100mph) from a standing start in 13.2 seconds. The car
was not fitted with a heat exchanger which resulted in an unacceptably high
fuel consumption of only 4mpg (1.4km/l).
Professor Felix Wankel started work on a preliminary design for a rotary
combustion engine in 1954 and the first experimental model was run in 1957,
although his ideas had originated much earlier (see p. 325ff.). The first
production car to which it was fitted was a German NSU Spyder which, with
a 500cc Wankel engine located at the rear, achieved a top speed of 150kph
(93mph) and an acceleration of 0–96kph (0–60mph) in 14 seconds. The
engine gave 41kW (55bhp) at 6000rpm with a compression ratio of 8.5:1. The
touring fuel consumption of the lightweight car was 12.4km/l (35mpg, 29 US)
and, in town driving, it registered only 9.2km/l (26mpg, 21.6 US). Though the
Wankel engine has since been licensed to such manufacturers as Mazda in
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Japan and there seem to be advantages in terms of weight and size, the
relatively high fuel consumption figures oppose the general adoption of this

radical and ingenious substitute for the orthodox design of internal combustion
petrol engine.
TRAMS AND TROLLEYBUSES
Tramways had long been in use in collieries and were the origin of railways
(see Chapter 11). They also spawned the street tramways which became
popular as public transport for passengers in the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. They originated in the USA where, due to the soil conditions and
the lack of plentiful stone for road building, conditions were particularly
favourable for their employment. The first horse-drawn tram was built in 1831
by John Stephenson for the New York & Harlem Street Railway, opened in
1832. Its coach-built body had three compartments and was slung on leather
straps on an unsprung underframe running on four wheels, with the driver’s
seat on the roof. It carried thirty passengers. The idea of the street tramway
gradually spread to other American towns and then overseas, reaching Paris in
1855 and Birkenhead, on Merseyside, in 1860.
An American merchant, appropriately named G.F.Train, was
responsible for the Birkenhead tramway and, later the same year, laid a
line between Marble Arch and Notting Hill Gate in London, opened in
1861. He used the 5 inch (12.5cm) flat rail with a 7/8 inch (22mm)
raised flange at one side that had originated in Philadelphia in 1851. It
weighed 50lb per yard (24.8kg/m). Train laid similar lines from
Westminster Bridge to Kennington and between Buckingham Palace and
Victoria Station but, having failed to obtain parliamentary sanction, the
concession was withdrawn by the city authority and no further tramways
were laid in London until 1869 when the North Metropolitan tramline
started up. Horse-drawn trams are still to be seen in operation today in
the summer season in Douglas, Isle of Man.
Not unnaturally steam enjoyed a period of favour as a form of traction, its
foremost proponents being Messrs Kitson & Co of Leeds, though Manning,
Wardle & Co of the same city were before them, having built a car for export

to Pernambuco, Brazil, as early as 1866. The first steam tram in England,
patented by J.Grantham, ran between Victoria and Vauxhall in London,
starting in 1873. Early steam trams had the engine and boiler mounted within
the passenger cars, but in some of the later designs the source of dirt, smoke
and heat was set at a distance from the passengers, engine and boiler being
mounted on a separate trailer. Kitsons, probably the most successful builders of
steam trams—they built over 300 of them between 1879 and 1901—started
building to the design of W.R.Rowland for Copenhagen in 1876 and
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457
developed their own designs by experiment from 1878. It is notable that six
steam tramcars exported to New Zealand in 1879 were all still working in 1937.
The last steam tramway in England ran between Wolverton and Stony
Stratford until 1926.
Electric traction was the optimum solution for tramways but in most cases
had to wait until a suitable source of supply was available. In some instances,
as at Bristol, the tramway company built its own power supply station. Leeds
led in Britain, having electric trams in 1891, although Werner von Siemens
had built them for Berlin where they were running in 1882. A roof-mounted
collector was used in most cases, taking electric current from overhead wires
strung from poles, although, in some installations, a collector-shoe running
through a narrow slot between the rails into a wider electrified groove
performed the same function. Rail gauges used varied widely, 3ft 6in, 4ft and
4ft 8 1/2in (106.7cm, 121.9cm, 143.5cm) all being common. Varying gauges
were often found in neighbouring towns, some almost contiguous, a point
certainly not in favour of the tramways.
The main disadvantage of street tramways was that halts could only be
made by the car pulling up in the middle of the roadway with a consequent
danger to ascending and descending passengers from being struck by other
vehicles in spite of preventive legislation. An alternative was the trolleybus,

which could collect current from the same overhead wires and yet, running on
wheels as opposed to rails, could draw up close to the kerb. Developed in the
USA before the First World War and having pneumatic tyres, the trolleybus
became popular municipally between the wars. It still had, however, the other
disadvantage, that one trolleybus could not overtake another on the same line.
As a result, their heyday was a short one. London withdrew its fleet in 1960
but they survived in Bradford from 1911 until 1972. Glasgow retained its
tramcars until September 1962. They are, of course, still used in towns where
they are particularly suitable such as Moscow, where the streets are wide and
there is relatively little other conventional traffic.
BUSES
Until late in the nineteenth century, the steam engine was virtually the only
form of motive power available for ‘locomotion’ apart from human and animal
power. The improvements in the roads, especially those made by Telford and
McAdam (see p. 434–5), were conducive to efforts to replace the horse with a
steam engine, as was the considerable increase in the cost of fodder for horses
that was brought about by the war with Napoleon. Trevithick’s use of high
pressure steam was a major contribution towards reducing the weight as well
as the size of the steam engine so as to make it an acceptable form of traction
for road vehicles.
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The period 1820 to 1840 was a particularly active one, with a host of steam
carriage experiments of which, perhaps, those of Walter Hancock and of Sir
Goldsworthy Gurney were the most notable. Some were for private carriages
but others, carrying between 12 and 24 passengers, particularly in the London
area, plied for hire and competed with the horse-drawn ‘omnibus’ that George
Shillibeer had first put into service in July 1829. Drawn by three horses
harnessed abreast, it ran between Paddington Green and the Bank. Later
‘buses’, particularly from the period of the Great Exhibition of 1851, had seats

longitudinally along the roof, the passengers, seated back to back, being
separated by a ‘knifeboard’ backrest. Horse buses were not finally replaced by
internal combustion engined buses in London until 1911.
ELECTRICALLY OPERATED VEHICLES
The need for fuel economy revived interest in the subject of electric vehicles and
their viability. Around 1900 there was a short period when they became popular
as ‘town carriages’, largely on account of their quietness and smoothness of
operation compared with vehicles driven by the internal combustion engines of
the time. The Krieger Electric Brougham, made by the Compagnie des Voitures
Electriques was typical. The front wheels of this heavy machine were each
driven independently by a pair of motors (compound wound 4-pole) supplied by
twenty 193 ampere-hour cells giving a range of some 80km (50 miles) when
fully charged and a maximum speed of 29–32kph (18–20mph). The lead-acid
batteries must have made up much of the car’s 2-tonne weight, a failing of many
more recently developed electric vehicles which has restricted their use to such
applications as milk floats, runabouts for lazy golfers and motorized transport for
the elderly and disabled. It is noteworthy that the Krieger vehicle had a
regenerative braking system which allowed the motors to become generators
when coasting. A similar characteristic applied to certain designs of bus with
hydrostatic transmission which were developed in the 1960s.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, electric vehicles competed
seriously with the internal combustion engine. Four out often cars sold in the
United States were electric, another four were steam-driven while only two had
petrol engines. The first road vehicle to travel at over 100kph (62mph) was
Camille Jenatzy’s battery-powered ‘La Jamais Contente’ in 1899. The London
Electrobus Company, formed in 1906, planned to have 300 electric buses
running within a year. Unfortunately the technology was not sufficiently
advanced and passengers on their first bus in 1907 objected strongly to the
acid fumes from the batteries to which they were subjected. The company was
wound up three years later.

Recent attempts at economy have included Sir Clive Sinclair’s C
5
electric
three-wheeled car which seemed to have little more in its favour than the fact
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459
that it could be driven without holding a licence. Production, never notable,
soon ceased for it would seem that Sir Clive or his marketing team misread the
signs. Today, only some 40,000 of the 21 million or so vehicles in Britain are
electric, but there is a chance of a real resurgence with the introduction of
Alcan’s new and experimental alumium/air battery.
The Alcan battery would have an alkaline or saline electrolyte, with the
aluminium anode as the replaceable element. Another alternative is the
sodium/ sulphur battery developed by Chloride Silent Power. Here again is the
promise of a battery with three times the output and only half the weight of a
lead-acid battery which would greatly increase the chances of electric drive as a
replacement for the internal combustion engine. Non-vehicular applications are
also conceived by the makers for the future.
ROAD TRANSPORT ANCILLARIES
The automobile age has spawned a host of ancillaries, of greater or lesser
importance, to the carriageways and their accompanying vehicles. It is
estimated that if William Symington (see p. 441) had built a full-scale carriage
and run it on the roads, he would have had to stop every 8 or 10 miles (12–
16km) to replenish his boiler water as the engine was non-condensing. In all
probability supplies would not have been readily available, muddy ditch-water
being hardly conducive to good boiler operation and long life. This is an early
example of the need for the now ubiquitous service station. When in 1888
Frau Benz, unknown to her husband, took a day-trip with her two teenage
sons in one of his experimental cars, they stopped to buy petrol from an
apothecary, the only retailer who then stocked it, and later at a cobbler’s to

have a new piece of leather fixed on to the wooden brake block. Naturally, at
both places, they topped up the radiator with water.
The petrol pump was invented as early as 1885 by Sylvanus F.Bowser of
Fort Wayne, Indiana, but he did not have the motor car in mind: the cask in
which he stored kerosene was tainting the nearby buttercask in Gumper’s
General Store. Not for a further twenty years did he apply his idea to the
petrol used in automobiles. Bowser’s pump measured out a gallon (US, 3.785l)
at each stroke. In 1925 he produced a pump which registered the amount
drawn off on a dial gauge and in 1932 he incorporated an automatic price
indicator. Hand-operated Bowsers were installed at filling stations in the UK in
1920 and the following year an enterprising proprietor in Manchester put in an
automatic Bowser pump at his garage.
The first known service station or garage dates from 1896 when A.Borol in
Bordeaux advertised his motor workshop and the fact that he would send out
petrol, oil and spares to motorists in need of them. He was also the agent for
Peugeot. A service station was advertised in the local press in Brighton in 1897.
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460
The advertisement also appeared in the Autocar magazine. The Automobile
Gasoline Company opened the first bulk storage filling station at St Louis,
Missouri, in 1905. Two years later Standard Oil of California set the trend in
canopied forecourts when they opened the first at Seattle, Washington. In the
UK, the first was at Aldermaston, Berkshire, in 1920, with a hand pump
supplying National Benzole, an air compressor, water tap, fire extinguisher and
a telephone. The station was manned by Automobile Association patrolmen
and was for the use of members only.
(‘Garage’ is, of course, a word of French origin, meaning a place of shelter,
and is contemporary with chauffeur, literally a man employed to warm or heat
up the engine before starting. This was a lengthy but essential process with
hottube ignition such as preceded electrical systems. A bunsen-like spirit flame

was applied to the outer end of the tube, the other end of which ran into the
combustion chamber.)
Road and street lighting are very different from medieval days when an Act
called for the citizens of the City of London to light their streets, using
containers shaped like frying pans and filled with fat or tallow. Mention must
be made here of traffic lights which are allied to railway signals but specifically
an adjunct of the road. The first in Great Britain were lit by red and green
gaslights, a pair of coloured filters being carried in the extension of a pair of
semaphore arms. They were erected in 1868 in Bridge Street, New Palace
Yard, Westminster, but did not immediately find universal favour for the gas
exploded, killing an unfortunate police constable. The inventor was a Mr J.P.
Knight, as one might expect a railway signalling engineer.
Cleveland, Ohio, was the first city to have electrically powered red and
green lights, in 1914. Amber was added to these colours for the traffic lights
installed in New York in 1918, which were manually operated. In 1925 traffic
lights were installed at the junction of St James’s Street and Piccadilly in
London, manually controlled by a policeman in a central ‘signal-box’. The
next year saw time-controlled lights for the first time, in Wolverhampton. In
1932 the first vehicle-operated traffic lights in Britain started operation at the
junction of Gracechurch Street and Cornhill, in the City of London.
Painting white lines on the road surface originated in Wayne County,
Michigan, in 1911 and was introduced into Britain in 1914 when they were
used at Ashford, Kent. The first traffic signs came before the motor car, for
they were put up by the Bicycle Union in 1879. The first for motorists were
warnings on Birdlip Hill, Gloucestershire, erected by the Royal Automobile
Club in 1901. The safety of pedestrians involved traffic islands, which
started in Liverpool in 1862: the first in London was privately installed in St
James’s Street by Colonel Pierpoint so that he could cross safely to his club.
Further consideration for pedestrians was shown by the introduction of
pedestrian crossings, the first in Britain being in Parliament Square in 1926

and soon after round Piccadilly Circus. Lighted globes were used in the
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461
Belisha beacons first in Kensington in 1934, while the present zebra crossings
date from 1951.
An equally necessary but, to the motorist, less attractive device is the parking
meter first heard of in the 1930s. Carl C.Magee of Oklahoma City applied for a
US patent for such a meter in December 1932, but the patent was not granted
until 1936. In the meantime Professor H.G.Thuesen and Gerald A.Hale of
Oklahoma State University had also made a similar application which was
successful and resulted in the first motorist, the Revd C.H.North, having the
doubtful record of being booked for outstaying his welcome. The first parking
meters in Britain were installed, appropriately enough, outside the United States
Embassy in Grosvenor Square, London, in July 1958.
ROAD MAPS
Road books, showing the main towns, features and crossroads and the
distances between them had existed as early as Roman times, the Itinerarium
Antoninus being compiled about AD 200. The Romans probably measured
distances in paces, not the most reliable method. Leonardo da Vinci illustrated
in his notebook a form of ‘perambulator’ or odometer, in which a pebble fell
into a box every time the wheel revolved but, like so many of the inventions
that he sketched, it is doubtful if it was ever made. The frontispiece of John
Ogilvy’s Britannia, published in 1675, shows a waywiser being trundled along a
roadway with a more sophisticated form of gearing to count the revolutions of
its wheel. Waywisers, for measuring road distances, became quite common by
the mid-eighteenth century and, with more people travelling, there was a
growing demand for road books. When John Cary first became involved with
the mail service in 1794, he was to be paid 9d a mile by the Post Office to
measure the routes travelled, but he also took care to retain the right to publish
the results of his inspectors in a road book, which he did in 1798. Publishers of

earlier road books were quick to produce new editions using Cary’s
measurements: Cary sued them—and won.
Today we can rely on precise and accurate maps of the whole of Great Britain
produced by the Ordnance Survey by the process known as trigonometrical
surveying. The first set of such maps on a scale of an inch to a mile was begun
in the late eighteenth century shortly after the Ordnance Survey was established
in 1791 by the Duke of Richmond as Master-General of Ordnance. It was
concluded in the following century. The initial purpose of the first triangulation
was, in fact, to establish the distance between London and Paris.
All maps were originally printed by engraving processes as they were
successively developed; today the techniques of computer aided design and
photolitho printing, as applied to cartography, allow a high degree of accuracy
and frequent updating.