Chronoscope World’s historical maps are geographically aligned with each other and with other tools such as satellite images and street maps.

Maps fascinate us, with their concrete details on a given territory and their illusions about how much those details let us understand about the territory. But historical maps are typically islands unto themselves, hard to match up with other maps and records.

Chronoscope World, created by interactive experience designer Matthias Müller-Prove, smashes through this barrier.

This remarkable web app currently presents 6,974 historical maps, all georeferenced. Which means that maps of different time periods are automatically aligned with each other and with a wealth of related tools such as satellite images and Google maps. Moreover, many maps are supplemented with linked photographs and other historical materials.

I quickly found one striking result in Boston, checking out Saint Charles Street in the South End, where a nephew lives. Most of the South End once was tidelands—including my nephew’s street?

After finding Saint Charles Street on a satellite map within Chronoscope World, I switched to a 1780 German map and zoomed out a bit. Turns out that this location was at just about the skinniest point of Boston Neck, the narrow strip of land that made Boston a peninsula except at the highest of tides. (Below on the right, I already had a copy of a British Army map drawn during the siege of Boston, where I’ve now added a guesstimate as to the future home of Saint Charles.)*

After I chatted with Matthias on Mastodon, he was kind enough to add two more Boston area-maps, from 1829 and 1980. (They are centered on Charlestown and you can switch between them by hitting the “<” key.)

Below are a few random maps from browsing two of my favorite European cities. First, railways maps from London in 1874 and the present.

And here’s a series of Amsterdam in 1540, 1944 and now. (Yes, southside up.)

These examples only hint at what we map addicts can do with the Chronoscope global cornucopia of maps, tools and linked resources. Unsurprisingly, Matthias and his collaborators have assembled a particularly rich set of projects on Hamburg, where his Chrono Research Lab is based. (One project located the homes of many Hamburg residents in 1653—via information gathered from British admiralty records!) And I’m checking out the Chrono Port Cities collection.

Chronoscope World comes with a beautifully designed interface but you probably want to begin with this five-minute introduction. I also found Matthias’s 37-minute webinar well worth viewing.

As he says, happy time traveling!

* After Matthias added still more Boston maps, we found that the two 1780 maps showing the future Saint Charles Street as sitting neatly on Boston Neck probably were wrong—more recent maps show that this location was well out into the Back Bay.

p.s. Local mapaholics can also check out the Leventhal Center’s Atlascope Boston.