D.F. Sotzmann.

Portrait of Daniel Friedrich Sotzmann (1754 - 1840), engraved by F. Westermayr. Sotzman was a German cartographer and surveyor. He is considered the main initiator of the commercial cartography in Berlin.
Daniel F. Sotzmann, the son of a Spandau pewterer comes from a family of craftsmen received in 1770 on his own initiative in engineering education at the Citadel in Spandau prison Ing-captain Materne. 1771 he should have exercised an activity self-taught as a surveyor. From 1772 or 1773 he found employment as a cartographic draftsman under the direction of Carl Ludwig Oesfeld (1741-1804) and made five drawings in this time of Brandenburg regions and districts. Until 1778 he was conductor at the Royal Civil. Immediat-Building Commission at Potsdam ("very clever artist" with architect Carl von Gontard), he began to deal with geography.

By 24 he was in 1778 appointed a ministerial official to Berlin as a "secret expedierender secretary and architect" at the General Tobacco Administration in Berlin (in the Office of the Minister, Count von der Schulenburg-Kehnert), probably he was the character work for the Schulenburgsche country taking part. The map sheets of Schulenburg Schmettauschen cards that work are not signed and therefore can not detect the respective artist and engraver cards. During this time he learned the engraving.
Between 1782 and 1784 he made drawings of many areas of Brandenburg for Schulenburg Kehnert and the military-department. In 1783 the first maps are publications as supplements to books recorded by him (a plan of Gdansk, a map of the young United States), this was the beginning of intensive cartographic publishing activities to 1807th Between 1785 and 1789 was several times employed as an engraver.

The Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin in 1748 had obtained the monopoly for card production in Prussia and the privilege of levying a stamp duty on imported cards. The royal monopoly coupled with the publication of cartographic claim could only be realized with the appointment of Johann Christoph Rhode as a geographer at the Academy. 1786, aged only 32 years, the appeal was to the geographer of the Royal Sotzmann. Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin as the successor of Rhode, above all due to his outstanding skills as an engraver. This hope was apparently a reduction in the cost of renting it to be created maps and atlases of the Academy. His map of 1789 "Prospectus Regnis Borussiae tam Orientalis Occidentalis emendatior quam, et ad statum more present concinnatus Jussu et auspiciis ACAD. REG. SCIENT. ELEG et. LITT. ICRAG a" is one of the earliest works, the shares in West Prussia and East Prussia.

In 1791 he designed his first globe as a counterpart to a celestial globe by Johann Elert Bode (1747-1826), the 1790 had this in the publishing David Beringer published in Nuremberg. With a total of 36 detailed itineraries on the segments presented his globes an important contribution to the history of the discovery of the 18th and early 19 Century dar. Sotzmann and Bode produced yet another globes that were in the years 1804 and 1808 by the publisher Johann Georg Franz distributed in Nuremberg.

Sotzmann 1795/96 caused by its own school atlas for the replacement of the old Academy Atlas, whose records, moreover, were worn so that Sotzmann ashamed to even let them make prints.

1802, the appointment is made for war. In 1810, he performs the calculation of the area on behalf of Royal Prussia. Prussian Statistical Bureau of. In the grounds of the Prussian land survey, 1816, must adjust Sotzmann after many years of high creativity because of increasing visual impairment and blindness gradually his cartographic work. In 1825, he is placed "on account major mistake in office" to retire. He died in 1840 at an advanced age in Berlin.

Daniel F. Sotzmann can be described as the founder of commercial cartography in Berlin. With his name more than 400 titles are linked, include the individual map sheets, sheeted maps, atlases and globes, but also essays and reviews. He made it too many non-European maps, such as the newly independent states of the 1776 North American confederation, under which he is also very well known in North America. But of the subscribed by it and usually also published maps - only the first Edition counted - 285 Title detectable.
The importance of sustained efforts Sotzmann to the normalization of character keys and map scales have been. In the sum of his life's work has created more than 50 m² Sotzmann cards, which is five times the display area of the 1:200,000 Topographic Map (TC 200) of the Federal Republic of Germany.

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