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The first biography of the 19th-century genius, the person who plotted Manhattan's famous city grid. John Randel Jr. (1787-1865) was an eccentric and flamboyant surveyor. Renowned for his inventiveness as well as for his bombast and irascibility, Randel was central to Manhattan's development but perished in financial damage. Showing Randel's engrossing and dramatic life tale for the first time, this eye-opening biography presents an unheralded pioneer of American anatomist and mapmaking. Priced with "gridding" that which was then an undeveloped, hilly island, Randel recorded the curves of Manhattan right down to the stones on its shores. He was enthusiastic about accuracy and reliability and steeped in the ideals of the Enlightenment, in which math and science promised dominion over character. The effect was a series of maps, astonishing in their depth and perfection, which undergird our understanding of the island today. During his various job Randel created surveying devices, designed an early raised subway, and proposed a controversial choice way for the Erie Canal - winning him admirers and enemies. The Way of measuring Manhattan is more than simply the life of your unrecognized engineer. It is about the ways in which surveying and cartography improved the ground beneath our ft. Bringing Randel's tale into the present, Holloway vacations with modern day surveyors and researchers endeavoring to envision Manhattan as a untamed island once more. Illustrated with dozens of historical images and traditional maps, The Way of measuring Manhattan can be an absorbing tale of a fascinating man that catches the period when Manhattan - indeed, the whole country - still looked new, as soon as before canals and railroads helped draw a grid across the American landscape.
