PLACES & MAP
Four countries, fifteen discoveries, one schematic map. Our core region is Switzerland and Liechtenstein; Austria and Germany are covered selectively. Pins mark each archive's location — the map is schematic, positions are approximate to city level.
Schematic equirectangular plot — positions are approximate to city level; the background shows a coordinate grid, not national boundaries. Select a pin to jump to its entry below.
The atlas's centre of gravity: federal research institutes of the ETH Domain, world-scale physics, hidden manufacturing champions, watchmaking cities and the longest railway tunnel on Earth — all packed into a country you can cross in an afternoon.
A doubly landlocked principality of barely 40,000 people between Switzerland and Austria — and, improbably, the home of global leaders in construction fastening and dental materials. The whole country fits between the Rhine and the mountains; its industry reaches every continent.
Coverage focuses on Austria's Alpine engineering tradition: Vorarlberg's ropeway cluster, which supplies cable transport to the world, and the Semmering — the 1850s railway that taught the Alps how to be crossed, now a World Heritage line with a base tunnel growing beneath it.
German coverage is selective, anchored on two institutions of European significance: the Esslingen automation company that teaches robots from birds and kangaroos, and the Munich museum island where the industrial age has explained itself for more than a century.
