The original is from John Bartholomew and co. from the Edinburgh Geographical Institute. It was published in 1914 in the Atlas of economic geography by Oxford University Press.
https://archive.org/details/atlasofeconomicg00bart/page/n93
It's a bit unexpected to see the interior of the Amazon region is more accessible than the interior of Australia or the northern regions of Alaska. My guess is that commerce is driving exploration/exploitation of the interior of the Amazon (more than those other places).
May be that you're being confused by the map projection[0] -- South America is much much closer than Australia, and you can also take a direct flight there.
LHR - Rio: 5,734 mi, and it's a direct flight. 11-12 hours ish in the air.
LHR - Perth: 9,009 mi, and it wasn't possible as a direct flight when the map was made, meaning you'd be doing pretty well to get it done in under 20 hours, assuming Perth is even your best jumping-off point. You're looking at another three hours to get to SYD or MEL.
Once there, there are no shortage of airstrips in central Brazil.
My guess would be a combination of the relative closeness of the next airport to any given point in the Amazonas region and the flight time from London to South America being about 10 hours shorter than to Australia due to 5km less distance and favorable flight direction regarding the earth's rotation.
Not sure how the new map was generated, but it would be extremely cool to be able to plug in any city and have a map generated. Or at the very least have it for other major cities; I'd totally buy one with times from San Francisco.
I remember reading under an emergency the Roman's sent a new governor to London from Rome. With the ability to commandeer any resources available, took him about 22 days.
1600 years later the British recalled an ambassador from Rome under an emergency. Took him 22 days.
>1600 years later the British recalled an ambassador from Rome under an emergency. Took him 22 days.
Comical but not a 1:1 comparison since presumably the British didn't dispatch a private jet the instant he was recalled or give him the authority to commandeer whatever resources he wanted.
If Thresa May, Donald Trump, Angela Merkel and Vladimir Putin all decided right now that they wanted to go have a cook out in a swamp in the Yukon they could probably all be crushing beers and eating burgers Saturday evening (local time).
I think it was between the French revolution and the defeat of Napoleon. But my memory isn't clear enough to give exact dates.
Both cases it's sailing ships and horses. Some of the limitation is probably human endurance. The pony express used relays of fit young men and teams of horses and I think the longest distance traveled by a rider was 130 miles.
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Very informative. Wonder how long it took to get from Greece to India at that time? Remember seeing a reference in a book on influence of the Cynics school on the later Platonic Academy, post Roman conquest, to a letter from one wealthy aristocrats' son to another concerning some 'Grand Tour' where they would travel to India to interact with Brahman intellectuals, then off to Persia to interact with Magi (there was a reference to the Dervish being useless) then back to Greece. Must have been at least a two year excursion.
I can give you an upper bound of 4 years - as that is how long it took Alexander's army to cover that distance(while winning a few battles here and there between all the walking).
When I was a kid in Britain in the 70s "Outer Mongolia" was slang for "the furthest corner of the Earth", and there it is one of the places with the longest travel time from Britain a few generations before. it's interesting how slang and preconceptions get fossilised in children's vernacular.
My wife is from the Chinese regions of Inner Mongolia, which I didn't even know existed until I met her. It looks like her hometown would actually have been harder to reach than Mongolia itself!
I think logically speaking any point within a region can only be as easy to reach as the region itself, and depending how you travel and how you define 'reaching the region' most probably will be required to be harder to reach than the region itself.
That said it must be cool being married to someone from the farthest corner of the earth. Congratulation.
Interesting to see how both the Suez Canal and the Trans-Siberian Railway "distort" the map: without them travel to eg India or the Far East would have been much slower.
I wonder how visa availability affected travel time in 1914 and 2015. I know that I'd like to travel in Europe, but getting visa is very burdensome and unreliable, so I'm just traveling elsewhere. World where you could ride anywhere and settle there without any paperwork sounds like a miracle we lost.
I used to burn with envy when I read about a 19th or early 20th century author or artist just picking up or moving to Paris, etc. I never read _anything_ about visas, immigration, etc.
Even now, there's no shortage of travel blogs talking about moving to a new country and the vast majority fail to address this key detail (usually it seems they're written by a spouse of someone from said country).
Unfortunately, I strongly suspect that the main reason we keep immigration controls around is that not long after we brought them in to force, travel got really cheap. In 1880 traveling internationally was a hell of a lot harder, and one supposes there weren't as many people doing it (even proportionally). There also was just an awful lot more Earth to go around - a world with 1 billion people is a lot less crowded.
Even now, most countries are fine with rich people entering. We just stopped being able to use "they came 5000 miles to get here" as a filter.
It's kind of interesting that even though I'm fairly left, this is one of the arguments against a strong social safety net that I can buy. When you view every potential immigrant as a potential expense it gets harder (even if only politically) to let people in without trying to filter out those likely not to be net contributors.
I'm from Kazakhstan. Must be easier for first-world countries, I guess. I can visit Turkey or Tailand relatively easy, so that's what everyone around is usually choosing.
If you want a proper adventure (maybe source your own aircraft?) you can probably go to Svalbard, which is Europe, if only just. The trick is to get there without going through Norway first.
"Svalbard has no border controls, and citizens of the 41 signatories of the Svalbard treaty (including such unlikely countries as Afghanistan and the Dominican Republic) need no visas or other permits to visit – or even work – in Svalbard."
Since Rome2rio had no interest in selling it, I licensed it and have it for sale on my website: https://www.wellingtonstravel.com/isochronic-map.html
I'd love to sell the original one too but couldn't determine the copyright owner and get a high quality version of it.