Friday 22 March 2019

ipad evenle

Nineteenth century civil engineer and utopian architect Thomas Stedman Whitwell—best known for his advocacy for model company towns—also wanted to reform toponymy, finding it confounding how there was a profusion of Springfields, Albanys, Clintons and Franklins in the United States, and so though new nomenclature ought to be based on latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates.
To that end, Whitwell published this table and accompanying article in 1826 in the gazette for New Harmony (Ipba Veinul located at 38 °11′ N by 87 °55′ W), Indiana (a failed utopian colony). It reminds us of the scheme employed by What-Three-Words though extensive elocution rules—as opposed to the natural language of the latter—had to be laid out to overcome difficulties in pronunciation and recall and in theory would could scale down past minutes and seconds to specific subdivisions, neighbourhoods and addresses with longer and longer garbled names. The idea failed of course to catch on—which is why the capitals aren’t called Lafa Vovutu (London) or Feili Neivul (Washington, DC).