Maps from the past on display

October 29, 2007 (WLS) -- If you like to stare at maps and dream of distant places, a new exhibit maps out the world from way back when.

Sometimes it's not easy to get from here to there. It's been that way throughout history and that's why maps were invented. "Maps - Finding Our Place in the World" is a new exhibit opening Friday at Chicago's Field Museum.

"The oldest we have is 1500 B.C., It's a map on a clay tablet from Nippur in what is present day Iraq. Then right on through to maps that are being digitally produced and used today," said John McCarter, President of The Field Museum

From 3,500 years ago, when some unknown mapmaker carved in clay the streets of his city, to the early 1800s, when Lewis and Clark put their expedition down on paper, to map after map from around the world and through the centuries. The Field Museum and the Newberry Library put it all together.

"Nothing like it has ever been done. These maps certainly have never been brought together. We have maps here that have left their home countries for the first time. We have ... ah ... three Leonardo da Vinci maps," said Bob Karrow, curator of maps for the Newberry Library.

Priceless da Vincis from when Leonardo made a few bucks as a cartographer, grom 1927 when Lucky Lindy flew across the Atlantic, this is the map he had with him.

Old maps, ancient maps and did you ever wonder how they did it? Face it, there were no airplanes, no satellites, no balloons. But yet, the maps were surprisingly accurate.

"When you see civil engineers out with road construction crews making measurements using instruments that measure angles and relative heights. They're basically doing and using the same techniques that were practiced three to four hundred years ago," said Jim Akerman, co-curator of maps, Newberry Library.

The map exhibit opens Friday and runs through January 27.

http://www.fieldmuseum.org/

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