Homann Heirs (1730 - 1848) were a map publishing house based in Nuremberg, Germany, in the middle to late 18th century. After the great mapmaker Johann Baptist Homann's (1664 - 1724) death, management of the firm passed to his son Johann Christoph Homann (1703 - 1730). J. C. Homann, perhaps realizing that he would not long survive his father, stipulated in his will that the company would be inherited by his two head managers, Johann Georg Ebersberger (1695 - 1760) and Johann Michael Franz (1700 - 1761), and that it would publish only under the name 'Homann Heirs'. This designation, in various forms (Homannsche Heirs, Heritiers de Homann, Lat Homannianos Herod, Homannschen Erben, etc..) appears on maps from about 1731 onwards. The firm continued to publish maps in ever diminishing quantities until the death of its last owner, Christoph Franz Fembo (1781 - 1848). More by this mapmaker...

Johann Matthias Hase (January 14, 1684 - September 24, 1742) was a German cartographer, historical geographer, mathematician, and astronomer. Born in Augsburg, Hase was the son of a mathematics teacher, thus exhibited skill at mathematics early in life. He began attending the University of Helmstedt in 1701, where he studied mathematics under Rudolf Christian Wagner and then moved to the University of Leipzig to pursue a master's degree. He received his master's in 1707 and promptly returned to Augsburg to work as a teacher. However, he soon returned to Leipzig to serve as court master for two Augsburg patricians. There he became increasingly involved with geography, astronomy, and cartography as adjunct to the philosophical faculty. Hase was recommended for the position of chair of higher mathematics at the University of Wittenberg by his former professor, Christian Wolff, in 1715, but he was rejected. Five years later in 1720, however, he was named Professor of Mathematics at the University of Wittenberg. It is unclear exactly when Hase began working with the Homann Heirs firm, but he Hase compiled numerous maps under that imprint. He was also a prolific writer, publishing several treatises on universal history. Learn More...

Georg Maurice Lowitz (1722 - 1774) was a German cartographer, astronomer and professor of mathematics. His youth is not documented, but his parents were Wolfgang Lowitz and Catherine Lobits. He was director of the observatory at Göttingen for a timne. In 1766 he travelled to Saint Petersburg, Russia, to join the Academy of Sciences. He observed the 1769 transit of Venus from Gureyev (modern Atyrau) north of the Caspian Sea. During the 1773-75 Pugachev Rebellion he was employed by Russia in making surveys to construct a canal between the Volga and the Don rivers when he was captured by Pugachev's Cossacks, and killed. Learn More...

Gerhard Friedrich Müller (Фёдор Ива́нович Ми́ллер; October 29, 1705 - October 22, 1783), also known as Fyodor Ivanovich Miller, was a Russian-German historian, ethnologist and cartographer. He was born in Herford and educated at Leipzig. In 1725, he was among the European scholars invited to St. Petersburg to co-found the Imperial Academy of Sciences. Müller took part in the Academy's Great Northern Expedition (Second Kamchatka Expedition; 1733 - 1743), he and eighteen scientists and artists traveled the area to perform ethnological and botanical studies, as well as collecting data for the creation of maps. Müller's descriptions and categorizations of clothing, religions and rituals of the Siberian ethnic groups earned him the title 'father of ethnography.' He produced an essential map of the arctic and sub-arctic regions of the Pacific in 1754, motivated to counter the geographic frauds perpetrated by Joseph Nicholas De l’Isle (1688 - 1768) and Phillippe Buache (1700 - 1773). He knew both Vitus Bering (1733 - 1743) and Aleksei Chirikov (1703 - 1748), and was as close to his subject matter as any cartographer of his age. Learn More...