And there on the new map was Agloe, in exactly the same location. Lindberg and Ernest Alpers.Ī few years went by and then another map of New York State was published by a rival company named Rand McNally. They recently told of how the General Drafting Company published a map in the 1930s with a fake town in upstate New York named Agloe, created by jumbling the initials of two people at the company, Otto G. This is thought to be the explanation for why a place named Argleton appeared on Google Maps and Google Earth in an empty field off the A59 in West Lancashire.Īfter being spotted by a local in 2008, and featured by BBC News, Argleton vanished just as mysteriously as it had appeared.īut my favourite story about copyright traps comes courtesy of the brilliant podcast, 99% Invisible. This includes a walkway called Bartlett Place – named after Kieran Bartlett, a sales manager at the publisher. There are said to be around 100 “trap streets” in the current London A-Z. One method mapmakers use is quite ingenious: they add small deliberate errors, known as copyright traps. So it is understandable they have always sought to protect their efforts from competitors who might publish the work as their own. Only after undertaking this mammoth task, and publishing the results, can a mapmaker hope to recoup their investment. Today satellite imaging is used, before that aerial photography, and before that rain-soaked men and women stood in fields with tripods, compasses, telescopes and other cumbersome tools. Mapmakers must invest huge resources into surveying the land and meticulously marking anything that might be useful to their audience. According to a 2012 article in Cabinet, Moat Lane once curved its way through North London, at least in the regular view of on Google Maps, although the satellite layer revealed that the place where the lane was supposed to exist was a disparate collection of trees and houses - there was no lane there at all.Cartography is an expensive business. The TeleAtlas Directory, the basis for Google Maps, is said to have included several trap streets. Usually, these "mistakes" are minor: tiny (and entirely false) bends in rivers and roads, or slightly altered mountain elevations. These may include fake streets, as the name suggests, but the term is also applied to other erroneous cartographic data included to embarrass those who might steal it. map of East LA (1966), one of the many companies to include trap streets (via david/Flickr user) - although they don't always admit it - is by including "trap streets," deliberate mistakes added to maps to catch unsuspecting copyright violators.
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