Jean-Frédéric d'Ostervald
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Jean-Frederic d'Ostervald (born May 13, 1773 Neuchâtel ; † January 14, 1850 ) was a Swiss cartographer and general commissioner .
Life
Jean-Frederic d'Ostervald was born the second of nine children to a wealthy and influential family in the city of Neuchâtel . His great-grandfather was the Reformed theologian of the same name and his grandfather was the knowledgeable editor of the common law of the principality. Jean-Frederic's father Ferdinand was a lieutenant colonel in the Dutch service and was married to Elisabeth Pury. Jean-Frederic lost his father at the age of eight. There is no evidence of the boy's education. Presumably he was attending the city college. Only his wedding is recorded in a document. On March 2, 1795, the 22-year-old Ostervald Rose-Marie married Alexandrine d'Ivernois, daughter of a state councilor and finance director. This marriage had four daughters.
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In order to get a job as an adjunct to the renewal of the plans and fiefdoms of the Principality of Neuchâtel (under the King of Prussia ), Ostervald had to acquire knowledge of surveying technology. That is why he got in touch with Johann Georg Tralles , who was mathematics and physics professor at the Academy in Bern from 1785 to 1803.
Ostervald himself had already started the surveying work at his own expense when he proposed to the King of Prussia a general survey of the site and a complete renewal of the fiefdom recognitions, a forerunner of today's land register . Ostervald wanted to take a very detailed picture (scale of one inch by 500 feet, i.e. about 1: 5000) and base it on a series of trigonometrically measured main triangles (see triangulation ). He also wanted to elevate all villages, houses, streets, streams, forests, vineyards and pastures. The total work should take five years and cost about £ 32,000. But with these demands Ostervald was ahead of his time. After several inquiries from the Council of State and after an additional report from the royal forest master, the court in Berlin finally approved £ 6,000 for the creation of a topographical plan.
In the years after the French Revolution , there was political instability. The timing for such projects was extremely unfavorable. Napoleon's triumphant advance through Europe seemed unstoppable. In December 1804 he crowned himself emperor, and in 1806 he marched into Berlin as a victor. Despite a total defeat, Prussia was not completely dissolved, but degraded to a meaningless middle state. It lost half of its territory to France , including the Principality of Neuchâtel.
This political turmoil was reflected in financial problems. At the end of 1805 Ostervald received the money for his work, but had to pay it back in 1806 on royal orders, because the work was advanced but not yet finished. Immediately afterwards Neuchâtel passed to France. The originally planned goal of a detailed map was far from being achieved when Ostervald published his Carte de la principauté de Neuchatel levée de 1801 à 1806 et dediée à Son Altesse sérénissime le Prince et Duc de Neuchâtel par JF d'Ostervald on a scale of 1: 96,000 in 1811 .
When the map of Neuchâtel was almost finished, Napoleon gave the order, in accordance with his strategy in Europe, but without knowledge of Ostervald's work, to topographically record the newly occupied Principality of Neuchâtel. When the responsible engineer-geographers saw Ostervald's work, they declared that they couldn't do anything better. So Ostervald gave the card to the new government in Paris. In return he received a financial satisfaction of 8,000 francs - though not the full amount of the 12,000 francs he had originally asked for.
There is little evidence of Ostervald's thirty years of life between 1806 and 1836. Until 1810, Ostervald still worked as an adjunct in Neuchâtel and prepared detailed plans, for example for the road construction project from Neuchâtel to La Chaux-de-Fonds and Le Locle . Then he joined his brother Ferdinand's trading company, which suffered great losses due to the war in 1813 and 1814, so that it went bankrupt . Ostervald settled in Paris by 1821 at the latest . Since his brother was not very successful in business, he hoped to at least save his equity by taking over an art publisher . At times Ostervald was both editor and draftsman. He published wonderful illustrated books with z. B. the following titles: a trip over the Simplon to Chamonix , Sicily , the Mont Blanc , the Rhone . Unfortunately, these volumes did not sell well and eventually ruined him.
From 1836 Ostervald dealt again with map studies and carried out the triangulation of the canton of Geneva for the Geneva engineer officer Guillaume-Henri Dufour (1787–1875). Dufour had taken over the management of the federal land surveying in 1832 and at the same time carried out the cantonal survey of his home canton, to a certain extent as a test piece for the federal topographical map. In the spring of 1836 the government of Neuchâtel decided to issue a revised new edition of Ostervald's first map of Neuchâtel. In the autumn of 1836, the "Map Commission of the Principality" transferred the project management for the New Map of Neuchâtel to the 63-year-old Ostervald. This also involved an extensive trigonometric survey of the region. In 1846 the now 73-year-old Ostervald was able to hand over the completed set of maps to the map commission: one set of sixteen map sheets and twelve sheets of paper with the boundaries of the judicial districts. The work was handed over to the State Council and to the Prussian king, since Neuchâtel was part of both the Confederation and Prussia at the time.
In 1844, Ostervald was asked by the Swiss Society for Natural Research to publish a map of Switzerland as a whole. Thanks to his professional competence and his large circle of acquaintances among experts in Switzerland and France, Ostervald was able to announce the publication of a topographic map and road map of Switzerland on a scale of 1: 400,000 in the same year . As his last work, Ostervald published an auxiliary table for calculating the height differences in 1847: Tables auxiliaires pour le calcul des differences de niveau and a compilation of the heights of the country with 5550 points: Recueil des hauteurs du pays . Unfortunately, the card was not selling well. With the fall of the Ancien Régime , Europe was again in a period of upheaval.
Works
- Edited with explanations by Georges Grosjean: Canton Neuchâtel, sheet Neuchatel. A sheet of cards. Scale 1: 25000. 60 × 50 cm (color print), 47 × 41 cm sheet size + 1 sheet. Reprint of the edition from around 1846. Edition Plepp, A. Cavelti, Köniz bei Bern 1971.
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- Madlena Cavelti Hammer: Jean-Frederic d'Ostervald and his map of the Principality of Neuchâtel from 1838 to 1845. In: Cartographica Helvetica . Issue 9, 1994 (abridged)
Web links
- Literature by and about Jean-Frédéric d'Ostervald in the catalog of the German National Library
Individual evidence
- ^ New necrology of the Germans. Twenty-eighth year, 1850. Second part. Bernh. Friedr. Voigt, Weimar 1852, p. 858 .
- ^ Literature by and about Jean-Frédéric d'Ostervald in the catalog of the German National Library
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Ostervald, Jean-Frédéric d ' |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Osterwald, Jean Frédéric; Osterwald, Johann Friedrich von; Ostervald, Jean-Frederic d ' |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Swiss cartographer and general commissioner |
| DATE OF BIRTH | May 13, 1773 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Neuchâtel |
| DATE OF DEATH | January 14, 1850 |