Brief History of Centrography

Historically, the study of centrography began in the 1870s with the work of Julius E. Hilgard and the U. S. Bureau of the Census. Around the turn of the century, the Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleyev (or Mendeleev) began investigations of the center of gravity of the population of Russia. The Mendeleyev Centrographical Laboratory was formed in Leningrad in 1925 by several of his compatriots who had become interested in his studies.
 
The study of centrography as a distinct field reached its peak in the 1920s and 1930s. During this period there was an international race, which was led by centrographers in the United States, the Soviet Union, and Italy, to see who could compute and analyze the greatest number of centers of all kinds. But by the late 1930s the study of centrography had fallen into disfavor, partially because it could not live up to the absurd claims made for it by some of its proponents, in particular those in the Soviet Union. 

A re-evaluation of the field was made in the late 1950s when the Israeli geographer Roberto Bachi and the American geographer William Warntz, as well as others, recognized that centrography, while not important as an independent field of study, is one of the most useful tools in an overall system of quantitative geographic analysis.

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