Presentation

London Underground - Harry Beck

Harry Beck

Source

Henry Beck (1901-74)
London Underground map
1933
Lithograph on paper
Museum no. E.816-1979
Given by Ken Garland Esq

Henry Beck's London Underground map is the most famous transport map in the world, and an icon of 20th-century London. Beck was an unemployed engineer when he first devised the map. Prioritising the relationships between the lines and stations, rather than geographical accuracy, he used a method that recalls electrical circuit systems.

Source[TheVictoria&AlbertMuseum]

The striking Tube map that is recognised across the globe was the brainchild of Underground electrical draughtsman, Harry Beck, who produced this imaginative yet stunningly simple design back in 1933.

Beck based the map on the circuit diagrams he drew for his day job, stripping the sprawling Tube network down to basics.

The result was an instantly clear and comprehensible chart that would become an essential guide to London - and a template for transport maps the world over.

Beck's revolutionary design, with certain modifications and additions, survives to the present day and is set to serve London Underground and its millions of customers for many years to come.

Source[TFL]

Ken Garland on Harry Beck

The tube map almost never made it out of its creator’s notebook. The designer was Harry Beck, a young draughtsman who drew electrical circuits for the Underground. Beck’s biographer, Ken Garland, befriended him in the 1950s, and before the designer’s death in 1974 he uncovered the story behind the creation of what Beck called ‘the diagram’.

‘As a native of a small village in Devon and moving to London to study art, I found the metropolis impossible to navigate,’ Garland recalls. ‘I would get on the tube and see Harry’s diagram. London suddenly made sense, and so I asked people at the college if they knew who the designer was.’

Garland was told that HC Beck could be found at the London College of Printing, where he taught part-time, and he paid him a visit. They soon became friends.

Beck first drew his diagram in 1931 – a difficult time to be working for the newly established London Transport Passenger Board. With money tight, the board’s employees could be laid off at short notice. Beck, then 29, had been employed as a ‘temporary’ since he first started in 1925. While at work drawing an electrical circuit diagram, he had an idea: a new map that would raise the profile of the tube and attract much-needed new passengers, and that would make the system seem modern, quick, efficient – and, above all, easier to navigate.

At the time, the maps of the network showed individual lines run by different railway companies. It was geographically correct, but impossible to read. The lines snaked all over the place. The first map, published in 1908, betrayed the fact that different operators were competing with each other and could not agree where the Underground ended.

Harry laid out London’s Underground routes as he would a circuit board, and took it to the publicity department. He told Garland: ‘Looking at the old map of the railways, it occurred to me that it might be possible to tidy it up by straightening the lines, experimenting with diagonals and evening out the distances between stations.’

‘He was modest,’ recalls Garland. ‘He’d quietly taken the diagram to them and said: “You may be interested in this.” The publicity chiefs replied: “You can’t do it like this – the public will be really confused by the idea, no one will understand it.” ’

His idea was dismissed as ridiculous – people couldn’t understand why it wasn’t geographically accurate – and later he was laid off. Beck’s
dismissal made him suspicious of London Underground. He chose to sell the idea to them as a freelancer (for just ten guineas), giving him control over the future integrity of his design. But as work in his old office began to pick up, his former colleagues remembered him: they had appreciated his help in the tube workers’ orchestra and, in 1933, he was back on board and pitching his idea again.

Garland continues: ‘Beck would not take no for an answer. He went back with a revised copy, and finally they agreed to produce a small print run of 1,000 fold-out versions, put them in central London train stations and ask passengers for comments. One of the publicity team went to Piccadilly Circus and asked staff if anyone had been interested in the diagram. The maps had gone within an hour. Beck had been proved correct, and the publicity department arranged for a print run of 750,000.’

Harry Beck was good news for the tube. Passenger numbers had levelled off, and they needed a bright idea to sell the Underground. ‘Beck’s map was the catalyst,’ says Garland.

More than a million were in circulation within six months of being commissioned. Wall maps were next: Beck was paid a further five guineas to produce one. But for something that is so recognisable as a piece of ‘trademark’ art, Harry Beck was not, according to Garland, part of the modernist movement that was sweeping through the pysche of painters, sculptors, other designers and filmmakers of the period. ‘He was not influenced by contemporary art,’ says Garland. ‘He knew little or nothing about it.’

‘The diagram’, as Beck insisted it was called, was a lifelong obsession. As new routes were added, Beck would tinker with his design. He was constantly seeking to improve its clarity, and when the publicity department realised they had a hit on their hands, he had to fend off ‘helpful’ suggestions from tube bosses.

Beck added lines that were yet to be built: one route in a 1949 version has the Northern Line linking Finsbury Park on the Victoria and Piccadilly lines with Highgate. It gave Stroud Green and Crouch End their own stations, and Highgate became an interchange with a branch going to stations at Cranley Gardens, Muswell Hill and Alexandra Palace.

‘For the best part of 30 years, his home was turned over to the map,’ recalls Garland. ‘There were sketches all over the place. The front room would often have a massive copy spread out on the floor for Harry to pore over. His wife Nora would find, when making their bed, a pile of scribbled notes under the pillow that Harry had been working on in the middle of the night.’

But in 1959, after nearly three decades of working on the diagram, he was unceremoniously dumped from the project. Garland explains: ‘Harry went one morning to his local station and there on the wall was a diagram that was not done by him. It was devastating. To add to the insult, he thought it was a crude and ineffective version of his own diagram. It was signed by Harold F Hutchison, not a designer but head of the publicity department.’ According to Garland, Beck had become known in the publicity department for being ‘difficult’ when it came to the diagram, and there were moves to remove his stewardship.

Beck embarked on a letter-writing campaign to take back control of his life’s work. It was fruitless. London Underground accepted no argument that the current map was influenced by his work, or that it was an inferior design.

When Beck fell ill, his piles of sketches were destined for the dustbin, but Garland stepped in and saved them – recognising that they were crucial to understanding its development. Among the papers Garland saved was the first pencil sketch of the diagram, now at the V&A Museum.

The diagram’s iconic status should not be overlooked, says Garland. ‘It has touched so many people. The tube diagram is one of the greatest pieces of graphic design produced, instantly recognisable and copied across the world. His contribution to London cannot be easily measured, nor should it be underestimated.’ 

Source[Timeout]

After Beck

By 1960, Beck had fallen out with the Underground's publicity officer, Harold Hutchison. Hutchison, though not a designer himself, drafted his own version of the Tube map that year. It removed the smoothed corners of Beck's design and created some highly cramped areas (most notably, around Liverpool Street station); in addition, lines were generally less straight.^[8] However, Hutchison also introduced interchange symbols (circles for Underground-only, squares for connections with British Rail) that were black and allowed multiple lines through them, as opposed to Beck who used one circle for each line at an interchange, coloured according to the corresponding line.

In 1964, the design of the map was taken over by Paul Garbutt who, like Beck, had produced a map in his spare time due to his dislike of the Hutchison design. Garbutt's map restored curves and bends to the diagram, but retained Hutchison's black interchange circles (the squares however were replaced with circles with a dot inside). Garbutt continued to produce Underground maps for at least another twenty years — Tube maps stopped bearing the designer's name in 1986, by which time the elements of the map bore a very strong resemblance to today's map.^[9] Today, the Tube map bears the legend, "This diagram is an evolution of the original design conceived in 1931 by Harry Beck" in the lower right-hand corner.

While the standard Tube map mostly avoided representing mainline rail services, a new variant of the map issued in 1973, the 'London's Railways' map, was the first to depict Tube and surface rail services in a diagrammatic style closely matched to Beck's designs. This version was created by Tim Demuth of the London Transport publicity office and was jointly sponsored by British Rail and London Transport. Demuth's map did not replace the standard Tube map but continued to be published as a supplementary resource, later known as the 'London Connections' map.^[10]

Some alterations have been made to the map over the years. More recent designs have incorporated changes to the network, such as the Docklands Light Railway and theextension of the Jubilee line. It has also been expanded to include certain rail lines not part of the Underground network (see below), and to indicate which Tube stops connect with National Rail services, rail links to airports, and river boats. In some cases, stations within short walking distance are now shown, often with the distance between them (this is an evolution of the pedestrian route between Bank and Monument stations, which was once prominently marked on the map). Further, step-free access notations are also incorporated in the map.

In addition, since 2002 the fare zones have been added, to better help passengers judge the cost of a journey. Nevertheless the map remains true to Beck's original scheme, and many other transport systems use schematic maps to represent their services, likely inspired by Beck.

Despite there having been many versions over the years, somehow the perception of many users is that the current map actually is, more or less, Beck's original version from the 1930s — a testament to the effectiveness of his design. Beck did actually draw versions with other formats, 22½ degrees rather than 45 (the Paris Métro version uses 22½ degrees as a base); and an unused version for the 1948 Olympic Games.

One of the major changes to be made to the revision of the Tube map put out in September 2009 was the removal of the River Thames. Although historically the river was not present on several official maps (for example, according to David Leboff and Tim Demuth's book; in 1907, 1908, and 1919), from 1921 it was absent for several years (on pocket maps designed by MacDonald Gill). The Thames-free 2009 version was the first time that the river has not appeared on the Tube map since the Stringemore pocket map of 1926. This latest removal resulted in widespread international media attention,^[11][12] and general disapproval from most Londoners as well as from mayor Boris Johnson.^[13]Based on this reaction, the following edition of the diagram in December 2009 reinstated both the river and fare zones.

Source

London Underground - Charles Yerkes

Charles Yerkes played a huge role in the construction and development of the London Underground.

In August 1900, Yerkes decided to become involved in the development of the London Underground railway system after riding along the route of one proposed line and surveying the City of London from the summit of Hampstead Heath. He established the Underground Electric Railways Company of London to take control of the Metropolitan District Railwayand the partly built Baker Street & Waterloo Railway; Charing Cross, Euston and Hampstead Railway; and Great Northern, Piccadilly and Brompton Railway. Yerkes employed complex financial arrangements similar to those that he had used in America to raise the funds necessary to construct the new lines and electrify the District railway. In one of his last great triumphs, Yerkes managed to thwart an attempt by J. P. Morgan to enter the London Underground field.
Source[Wikipedia]

Yerkes

• Born in Philadelphia 
• 1850's went to jail
• 1870's went to Chicago
• 1880's he built a transport system in Chicago, he made many enemies
• Forced into semi retirement in New York
• At this point he looked to London and assisting with the construction of the Underground
• He bought Golders Green as it was cheap land to build on
• Hired Leslie Green as his architect so that all of his tube stations looked alike
• Yerkes died before any of his developments were built though they were in development
• He died in New York in 1905, a victim of kidney disease

London Underground - Forgotten stations

There are over 40 disused tube stations on the London Underground. One specifically is Aldwych station, this was first known as Strand station. The name Strand confused many passengers as there was already a station called this, Charing Cross as it is now known. The station was then changed to Aldwych. The station was closed due to the lift systems not meeting modern health and safety standards. There are 2 platforms within Aldwych station; Platform A which is still in use by film companies, and Platform B which is lost and unused. It is said that the ghost of a young actress still roams the tunnels waiting for her 'last curtain call'. The foot tunnels in Aldwych station were last used in 1994 though some were closed in 1907 and some were never open to passengers.

The Secret Station

London Underground - Advertising

Advertising has played a massive part in the tube and with the recent 150 year anniversary there is a campaign in order which is celebrating the advertising underground.

The placement of advertising on the tube is very clever, every spare bit of space has been utilised. An example of this would be the large advertising spaces above the tracks, opposite the platform; these adverts are placed here to ensure that passengers will look at them, whether on the platform or on the train as it is in the station. 

Examples:

Coca Cola at Bond Street

Londonist at Bond Street

London Fashion Week at Holborn station

In addition to these typical print ads there are now moving image advertisements on the walls of the tube tunnel, this is in an effort to catch the passengers attention with a moving image where they might not expect to see one. 

Advertising on the trains: 

Another way to ensure that the adverts are seen by people, they are placed in the train next to the map of the line, advertisers know that these maps are looked at by almost every passenger, meaning that they will see their ads.

Advertising:

Utilising every free space:

Advertising based on nearest tourist attraction:

V&A Gallery

West End Theatres

London Underground -The History

London Underground was formed in 1985, but its history dates back to 1863 when the world's first underground railway opened.

Today, London Underground is a major business with three million passenger journeys made every day, serving 275 stations and over 408 km of railway.

Past and future

London has changed a lot since the first stretch of line - the Metropolitan, or Met - opened on 9 January 1863. The first stretch measured six kilometres (nearly four miles) and ran between Paddington (Bishop's Road) and Farringdon Street.

Cut and cover

To build the Met, streets along the route were dug up, tracks laid in a trench, covered with a brick-lined tunnel and the road surface replaced. Known as the 'cut and cover' method, this was quick and effective, but created as many problems as it was designed to solve. It caused congestion during construction and it was abandoned towards the end of the 19th century. By then, however, the Metropolitan was a success, stretching ever further across Middlesex, through Hertfordshire and into Buckinghamshire.

Other companies were keen to get involved and by Christmas 1868, the Metropolitan District had opened a line between Westminster and South Kensington.

This linked to a branch line from the original Met and some eastward extensions. These railways completed today's Circle line by 1884.

Once the system had started there was no stopping it and the search was on for further opportunities.

The Thames Tunnel

Twenty years before the Met steamed into history, Sir Marc Brunel - and his famous son Isambard - had built the Thames Tunnel between Rotherhithe and Wapping.

This was the first underwater tunnel in the world. The method used was similar to coal mining. Engineers sank vertical shafts and excavated the tunnels from within a metal shield. It is a tribute to the Brunels that major refurbishment to the tunnel was only needed during the 1990s.

Originally designed for horse-drawn traffic, it opened in 1843 for pedestrians, became a railway tunnel in 1869 and now carries the East London line.

Tunnel vision

The Brunel Engine House Museum, behind Rotherhithe tube station, tells the story of this unusual tunnel: one time banquet hall, shopping centre, and fairground.

In 1870 another sub-Thames railway opened. This had a cable-hauled line between the Tower of London and Bermondsey.

In marked contrast to the Thames Tunnel, this failed as an Underground line and was converted for pedestrian use after just a few months. It closed for good when Tower Bridge station opened in 1894.

Source for Information

Steve Jobs Timeline

1955: Stephen Paul Jobs is born on Feb. 24.

1972: Jobs enrolls at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, but drops out after a semester.

1974: Jobs works for video game maker Atari and attends meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club with Steve Wozniak, a high school friend who was a few years older.

1975: Jobs and Wozniak attend Homebrew Computer Club meetings.

1976: Apple Computer is formed on April Fool's Day, shortly after Wozniak and Jobs create a new computer circuit board in a Silicon Valley garage. A third co-founder, Ron Wayne, leaves the company after less than two weeks. The Apple I computer goes on sale by the summer for $666.66.

1977: Apple is incorporated by its founders and a group of venture capitalists. It unveils Apple II, the first personal computer to generate color graphics. Revenue reaches $1 million.

1978: Jobs' daughter Lisa is born to girlfriend Chrisann Brennan.

1979: Jobs visits Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, or PARC, and is inspired by a computer with a graphical user interface.

1980: Apple goes public, raising $110 million in one of the biggest initial public offerings to date.

1982: Annual revenue climbs to $1 billion.

1983: The Lisa computer goes on sale with much fanfare, only to be pulled two years later. Jobs lures John Sculley away from Pepsico Inc. to serve as Apple's CEO.

1984: Iconic "1984" Macintosh commercial directed by Ridley Scott airs during the Super Bowl. The Macintosh computer goes on sale.

1985: Jobs and Sculley clash, leading to Jobs' resignation. Wozniak also resigns from Apple this year.

1986: Jobs starts Next Inc., a new computer company making high-end machines for universities. He also buys Pixar from "Star Wars" creator George Lucas for $10 million.

1989: First NeXT computer goes on sale with a $6,500 price tag.

1991: Apple and IBM Corp. announce an alliance to develop new PC microprocessors and software. Apple unveils portable Macs called PowerBook.

1993: Apple introduces the Newton, a hand-held, pen-based computer. The company reports quarterly loss of $188 million in July. Sculley is replaced as CEO by Apple president Michael Spindler. Apple restructures, and Sculley resigns as chairman. At Next, Jobs decides to focus on software instead of whole computers.

1994: Apple introduces Power Macintosh computers based on the PowerPC chip it developed with IBM and Motorola. Apple decides to license its operating software and allow other companies to "clone" the Mac, adopting the model championed by Microsoft Corp.

1995: The first Mac clones go on sale. Microsoft releases Windows 95, which is easier to use than previous versions and is more like the Mac system. Apple struggles with competition, parts shortages and mistakes predicting customer demand. Pixar's "Toy Story," the first commercial computer-animated feature, hits theaters. Pixar goes to Wall Street with an IPO that raises $140 million.

1996: Apple announces plans to buy Next for $430 million for the operating system Jobs' team developed. Jobs is appointed an adviser to Apple. Gil Amelio replaces Spindler as CEO.

1997: Jobs becomes "interim" CEO after Amelio is pushed out. He foreshadows the marketing hook for a new product line by calling himself "iCEO." Jobs puts an end to Mac clones.

1998: Apple returns to profitability. It shakes up personal computer industry in 1998 with the candy-colored, all-in-one iMac desktop, the original models shaped like a futuristic TV. Apple discontinues the Newton.

2000: Apple removes "interim" label from Jobs' CEO title.

2001: The first iPod goes on sale, as do computers with OS X, the modern Mac operating system based on Next software. Apple also releases iTunes software.

2003: Apple launches the iTunes Music Store with 200,000 songs at 99 cents each, giving people a convenient way to buy music legally online. It sells 1 million songs in the first week.

2004: Jobs undergoes surgery for a rare but curable form of pancreatic cancer. Apple discloses his illness after the fact.

2005: Apple expands the iPod line with the tiny Nano and an iPod that can play video. The company also announces that future Macs will use Intel chips.

2006: Disney buys Pixar for $7.4 billion. Jobs becomes Disney's largest individual shareholder, and much of his wealth is derived from this sale.

2007: Apple releases its first smartphone, the iPhone. Crowds camp overnight at stores to be one of the first to own the new device.

2008: Speculation mounts that Jobs is ill, given weight loss. In September he kicks off an Apple event and says, "The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated," making a play off a famous Mark Twain quote after Bloomberg News accidentally publishes, then retracts, an obituary that it had prepared in advance.

2009: Jobs explains severe weight loss by saying he has a treatable hormone imbalance and that he will continue to run Apple. Days later he backtracks and announces he will be on medical leave. He returns to work in June. Later it is learned that he received a liver transplant.

2010: Apple sells 15 million of its newest gadget, the iPad, in nine months, giving rise to a new category of modern touch-screen tablet computers.

Jan. 17, 2011: In a memo to Apple employees, Jobs announces a second medical leave with no set duration. Cook again steps in to run day-to-day operations. Jobs retains CEO title and remains involved in major decisions.

Aug. 24, 2011: Apple announces that Jobs is resigning as CEO. Cook takes the CEO title, and Apple names Jobs chairman.

Oct. 5, 2011: Jobs dies at 56. Apple announces his death without giving a specific cause.

Source

The Apple Logo

The Apple logo is one of my favourites as it is so simple. I wanted to look further into the different logos Apple have had over the years and the progression it has made.

The overly complex original Apple logo illustrated Isaac Newton sitting under an apple tree and was inscribed: “Newton… A Mind Forever Voyaging Through Strange Seas of Thought… Alone.” Its creator, Ronald Wayne, one of Apple’s founders, sold his 10% share of the company for a one-time payment of $800 (apparently his business skills matched his design skills).

Steve Jobs, whose mantra was always simplicity, had Rob Janoff of Regis McKenna Agency design the iconic striped apple. The more modern ITC Garamond Condensed typeface appeared in 1984 when Apple introduced the Macintosh. From 1984 to 2002 that typeface branded everything from the company to hardware and software developments such as QuickTime and FireWire. During that period, the rainbow striped apple gave way to several simpler, monochromatic versions.

Since 2002, Apple has consistently used the sans serif font Myriad Bold in all their communications. That font now brands the company, their iPhones, iPods and other hardware and software.

The History of the Bitten Apple//

The “bitten apple” is the logo of the well-known computer manufacturer Apple Inc. It is one of the easily recognizable logos in the whole wide world, a fitting symbol to the name of the company behind the picture. Here is one bite out of the apple’s history, to enlighten readers on how the logo sprang into existence.

Newton: Apple’s First Image //

The “bitten apple” logo has had a complicated yet very fitting history to its current image. The first logo for Apple Inc. during its incorporation in the 1970’s was entirely different, but was still related to the apple. To be specific, the first image to represent the computer company was Isaac Newton, the man who first discovered the company when a fruit fell on his head. What was that fruit? You guessed it: an apple!

Founders Steve Jobs and Ronald Wayne had come up with the logo, citing Wordsworth’s quote “Newton… a mind forever voyaging through strange seas of thought.”

The Apple Gets Its Turn //

The Newton logo was short-lived, as designer Rob Janoff right away changed the logo into the familiar apple shape with a bite off its right side. This version is adorned with multiple colors, the familiar colors in the rainbow.

Janoff’s motivations for the logo revamp have been a subject of several speculations. Some people think that the shift to the apple design was to make it more appropriate for the company name. Others think of it as a more fitting tribute to Newton and his discovery of the colors and gravity. The rainbow colored apple may have been an advertisement for the color capabilities of the second computer produced by the company, Apple II. There are also people who think that the apple symbolizes Alan Turning – the father of modern computing – who took a bite out of an apple poisoned with cyanide that ultimately took his life.

Just lately, the rainbow apple has been phased out and changed. The logo still features the familiar outline of the “bitten apple” but with a different color scheme. There are currently two color schemes for the symbol: white, and raw aluminimum.

The bitten apple logo may have had quite a history, a history whose parts remain unknown to people. However, it has not stopped the logo from being recognized all over the world. In fact, the company does not even have to print its name alongside the logo. The logo itself already tells it all.

It is clear that Apple wanted to pay homage to Isaac Newton with their logo, their progression over the years has been quite extensive. The logo has gone from quite a complex illustration to a simple and monochrome symbol of an Apple. This is partly down to Steve Jobs who recently passed away.