Franz Anton Schrämbl (Schraembl; 1751 - December 13, 1803) was a Vienna-based cartographer working in the later part of the 18th century. Schrämbl was born in Vienna. He became director of the normal school in Troppau but soon quit to set up a bookshop in Vienna. In 1787, with fellow Austrian Franz Johann Joseph von Reilly (1766 - 1820), he founded a publishing firm. He began his great work, the Allgemeiner Grosser Atlas, in the same year. This ambitious large format atlas was to be based upon only the most up-to-date cartographic information available, among them cartographers J. B. B. D'Anville (1697 - 1782) and James Rennel (1742 - 1830), and explorers such as James Cook (1728 - 1779), Charles Roberts (1739 - 1825), and others. The atlas was published in 1800 and became the first Austrian commercial world atlas. The work experienced minimal circulation, possibly due to its high cost. The low sales nearly drove Schrämbl into insolvency, but he recovered through diversification into literature and art books. When Franz Anton died in 1803, his widow Johanna and her brother, the engraver Karl Robert Schindelmayer (1769 - 1839), assumed control of the firm. In 1825, his son, Eduard Schrämbl, took over. More by this mapmaker...

James Rennell (December 3, 1742 - March 29, 1830) was an English geographer, historian and seminal oceanographer, known as 'the Father of Indian Geography'. He would become, in 1830, one of the founders of the Royal Geographical Society in London. Rennell was born near Chudleigh in Devon, England. At 14 he joined the British Navy as a midshipman and served in the Seven Years' War. During his time in the Navy he mastered marine surveying; when his ship, HMS Grafton, saw service in India, he began lending his services to the East India company, accompanying hydrographer Alexander Dalrymple and drawing charts between 1759 and 1764. Following the Seven Years' War, seeing no prospect of advancement in the Navy he left the navy and joined the British East India company's sea service, where he continued survey work. Eventually he would be commissioned with the Bengal Engineers, and his surveys in India proper began in earnest. He would become surveyor-general for the EIC in Bengal, remaining in service until 1777. He would retire from active duty with the rank of Major in the Bengal Engineers. From London, he published extensively: his 1779 Bengal Atlas, and his 1783 map of India set the standard for the mapping of the subcontinent. He set his career to paper in the 1788 book Memoir of a map of Hindoostan. Learn More...