Notes de la rédaction
This is the press release related to the article from Marguerite Silvestre, published on November 14th 2016. Read the article.
At the same time as surf engines were being developed for the internet, Paul Otlet (1868-1944) – ‘the man who wanted to classify the world’ – was rediscovered with the reopening of the Mundaneum in Mons in 1998. He had attempted to centralise all of the world's knowledge and, above all, to catalogue in full the bibliographical production from throughout history, from all places, and on every subject. Due to a lack of technical means which could equal his ambitions, his ‘Google in paper format’ fell into oblivion.
Very soon, with its aim to organise information on a world scale and to make it universally accessible and useful, Google began to tackle geographical information with its ‘Google Maps’ service in 2004. But once again, a forgotten forerunner from Brussels had opened up the way. In Brussels in 1825, Philippe Vandermaelen (1795-1869) began to publish his Atlas universel, which was the first to represent the Earth on a single and exceptionally large scale. And he provided the newly founded country of Belgium – without any official support – with complete, precise and reliable cartography, in line with the needs of an economy entering the industrial era.
He accomplished all of this in Molenbeek at his Etablissement géographique de Bruxelles, an unheard of achievement in Europe so unlikely to have been accomplished by a private individual. Vandermaelen worked on his maps and atlas there, as well as providing education and making scientific collections, an exceptional library and several laboratories available, even before the founding of Université de Bruxelles, the Bibliothèque royale and the major museums.
In 1880, when the collections of the Etablissement Géographique were liquidated, almost all of Vandermaelen's production and cartographic collections ended up at the Bibliothèque royale de Belgique. This arrival by far exceeded the institution's means in terms of inventory, cataloguing and conservation, with the result that everything was kept in the storeroom to wait for better times. It was not until the middle of the 20th century that the curator of the Maps & Plans section discovered the exceptional importance of this collection and decided to restore the forgotten cartographer to favour. It was not until 1990 that funds were released in view of making a systematic inventory of these collections.
In the 106th issue of Brussels Studies, Marguerite Silvestre, historian and current curator of the Maps & Plans section of the Bibliothèque royale de Belgique, provides a summary of twenty-five years of inventory and research in the Vandermaelen collection. She presents the conclusions of a book published concomitantly by the Bibliothèque royale de Belgique: Philippe Vandermaelen, Mercator de la jeune Belgique. Histoire de l’Établissement géographique de Bruxelles et de son fondateur.
The article and work it refers to present the life of the visionary geographer in a chronological journey centred on his cartographic production (methodology, collaborations, surveys, levelling, commercial management, etc.), ending with a passing of the baton to the Dépôt de la Guerre, the future Institut géographique national. It also opens the doors to Vandermaelen’s different institutional creations in a cross-cutting approach: the documentation centre, the natural history gallery, the lithography school and the École Normale, the museum of ethnography, and the organisation of scientific expeditions.
When he founded his Etablissement Géographique, Philippe Vandermaelen was a universal man. It was a time, after that of the Encyclopédistes, during which it still seemed possible for all human knowledge to be manageable by a circle of scholars, a single institution, or even by just one person. But soon, changing society, scientific and technological progress and the exponential development of knowledge broke universal science apart, causing the diversification and specialisation of knowledge. Vandermaelen experienced this change.
With the advent of search engines and Wikipedia – the free collaborative encyclopaedia – as well as OpenStreetMap, which is aimed at producing copyright-free cartography (also since 2004), the ambitions of Philippe Vandermaelen and Paul Otlet are perhaps becoming a reality.
References
Silvestre, Marguerite “Philippe Vandermaelen, the Mercator of young Belgium”, Brussels Studies [Online], General collection, No 106, November 14th 2016. URL: https://journals.openedition.org/brussels/1438
Contact
Benjamin Wayens, Senior Editor: bwayens[at]brusselsstudies.be



