Walter Blumer

Walter Blumer (born June 9, 1888 in Vouvry , † August 19, 1987 in Muri near Bern ) was a Swiss surveyor , cartographer and map collector.

Life

Blumer grew up in Bellinzona and Bern . He studied surveying engineering at the ETH Zurich . Until 1919 he worked for the Federal Topography as a topographer. Then he went into business for himself in Bern.

Blumer collected old maps and atlases throughout his life . He donated this to his home canton of Glarus in 1975 , for which he received the Glarus Culture Prize.

Blumer was married to the geographer Adele Margaritha Gerber and died at the age of 100.

Services

As a topographer in the service of the Swiss Confederation , he revised older sheets of the Siegfried map in the Bernese Seeland , in the canton of Neuchâtel and around Faido . In addition, he took up the map sheet around Neuenegg from scratch . According to his personal file in the Swiss Federal Archives , he was not on good terms with his superiors, which is why he left the federal service.

In his engineering office in Bern, which was not far from his previous workplace, he mainly dealt with topographical recordings in the Swiss Alps as part of the overview map of Switzerland 1: 10,000. His map of the Glärnisch area (1937), in which he realized his ideas of good rock drawings , received a lot of attention . A world map drawn for the League of Nations , with Geneva in the center, has been lost.

Early on he began to turn to old cards. Over the years, his map collection has become one of the most important private collections of its kind in Switzerland. He published his specialist knowledge in various publications, including a catalog of the topographical maps of the Canton of Glarus (1950) and a bibliography of the entire maps of Switzerland from the beginning to 1802 (1957). This second major work is still frequently quoted in the professional world and briefly referred to as "Blumer". In addition, he reproduced the manuscript cards of Aegidius Tschudi in small editions , which are in the St. Gallen Abbey Library . Since the donation in 1975, his map collection, together with Arthur Dürst's supplementary cartography library , has been a little-known but valuable map-historical research material .

Fonts

• Map of the Glärnisch area 1:25 000. Kümmerly & Frey, Bern 1937.
• The topographic maps of the Canton of Glarus. Benziger, Einsiedeln 1950. ( Swiss map catalog , fasc. 1).
• Bibliography of the complete maps of Switzerland from the beginning to 1802. Edited by the Swiss National Library in Bern. Kümmerly & Frey, Bern 1957. ( Bibliographia Helvetica , Fasz. 2).

literature

• Hans Laupper, Elmar Hilber: Atlases - Globes - Maps: from the Walter Blumer collection. Näfels 1976. (exhibition catalog)

Web links

• Hans Laupper: Walter Blumer. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .
• Publications by and about Walter Blumer in the Helveticat catalog of the Swiss National Library