Generated from the same geometry the printer is handed — the plate seen from directly above. It cannot show the relief, which is the part you have to hold.
The Rhine
From the Alps to the North Sea
The Rhine has organised European settlement, trade and war for two thousand years, and this plate shows why without drawing a single national border. The Alps sit white and high in the south, the basin opens northwest, and the great tributary pieces fan out from the main stem like a leaf. Children who know the Rhine only as a line on a school map are usually surprised by how much of Europe belongs to it.
What a child works out
- One river system can cross six countries and not care.
- The Alps are where the water starts; you can feel the drop.
- Names on a map — Mosel, Neckar, Main — turn out to be places, not just words.
The plate
- Pieces
- 20 pieces
- Plate
- 176 × 250 mm
- Scale
- 1 mm ≈ 3.4 km
- Vertical exaggeration
- × 2.74
- Thickness
- 8.8 mm
- Smallest piece
- 134 mm²
- Fit
- 0.35 mm clearance
- Material
- PLA, printed in Switzerland
7 named; the rest are sub-basins the source data leaves unnamed.
B5 — the size of a school exercise book.
How much ground one millimetre of plate covers.
Height is stretched by this factor so the relief is readable at desk size.
Nothing is cut smaller than a child can pick up.
Printed in place, so every piece seats first time without sanding.
Every named piece
- Aare
- Main
- Main 2
- Mosel
- Mosel 2
- Neckar
- Neckar 2
Zoom in, zoom out
A piece of each of these is the subject of the next one. Each plate is redrawn at its own scale, so it is a real map at every level rather than an enlargement of the one above.
Follow the water — The Rhine down to the river that runs through Zürich
More from Watersheds
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North America by River
A continent divided only by where water goes
No countries, no states. Twenty-nine pieces, each one the whole territory that drains into a single river.
- Pieces
- 29 pieces
- Scale
- 1 mm ≈ 49.4 km
- Suitable for
- Ages 8 and up
- Price
- CHF 120.00
The Mississippi
The basin that drains a third of a continent
Fifteen pieces — Missouri, Ohio, Arkansas, Red, Illinois — that together are about three million square kilometres of drainage.
- Pieces
- 15 pieces
- Scale
- 1 mm ≈ 14.5 km
- Suitable for
- Ages 8 and up
- Price
- CHF 120.00
The Ohio
Where the Appalachians drain west
Eighteen pieces: the Tennessee, the Cumberland, the Allegheny, the Monongahela, the Wabash and the ridges between them.
- Pieces
- 18 pieces
- Scale
- 1 mm ≈ 5.8 km
- Suitable for
- Ages 8 and up
- Price
- CHF 120.00