Raisz, Erwin (1893–1968)

Erwin Raisz played a key role in the professionalization of cartography within the discipline of geography, and deservedly he is ranked with early luminaries in the field such as John Paul Goode, Arthur Robinson, and Richard Harrison. His major contribution was in the area of landscape representation, and beginning at least a decade before World War II, he published literally thousands of maps, both large and small scale, depicting landforms throughout the world. Many were made to illustrate books, and even today his maps often continue to be used as book illustrations. He also authored General Cartography, which for decades was the only textbook in the English language on the subject.

The direction of Raisz's career seemed to have been established at his birth in 1893 in Levoca, a town in today's Eastern Slovakia. His father, a Hungarian civil engineer, was temporarily stationed there. Raisz has been quoted as saying that as a young child he occasionally carried his father's surveyor's rod and peeped into his transit. Following more or less in his father's footsteps, he studied engineering and architecture at the Royal Polytechnicum in Budapest and received his diploma with honors in 1914. Following military service in World War I, much of it in action, he briefly worked in Hungary, but in 1923, he emigrated to the United States, where he found employment in New York with a map company.

Shortly after his arrival, he entered graduate school at Columbia University's department of geography, receiving his doctorate in 1929. Raisz's cartographic skills began to be recognized during his student years at Columbia, not only by his professors, who used his maps to illustrate their research, but also by publishers who needed map illustrations. Raisz's own students also admired his skill at depicting landforms from contour maps. Raisz would enter the classroom with a roll of Kraft paper, from which he would unroll a long strip and pin it to the blackboard. Then, he would depict the map's surface with an array of colored chalk and a U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) contour map.

Raisz's landscape depiction skills led him to gain employment at Harvard's newly established [Page 2365]Institute of Geographical Exploration, where he remained for 20 years, his employment ending in 1950, when, shortly after the closing of Harvard's department of geography, the benefactor of the Institute withdrew his support. By then, Raisz's reputation as a cartographer was well established, and he carried on his work at home and as a visiting lecturer at universities in Virginia, Florida, and British Columbia. Raisz continued to work until his death in 1968 in Bangkok, Thailand, en route to a meeting of the International Geographic.