Last month's ICA column reported on the association's 50^th birthday celebrations, held in June 2009 at swisstopo in Wabern, Switzerland. International cartography representatives gathered to remember the founding fathers of ICA and consider the future of the discipline.

Two names consistently dominate the story of the establishment of ICA in the 1950s: Professor Carl Mannerfelt of Sweden and Professor Eduard Imhof of Switzerland. The anniversary celebration meeting was delighted to hear from two speakers intimately connected with these founding fathers: greetings were conveyed from 96-year-old Mannerfelt by Bengt Rystedt, an eminent Swedish cartographer and previous ICA president, whilst Walter Imhof, son of Eduard, gave a personal recollection of his father.

Walter Imhof explained how the lure of mountain hikes around his birthplace in Schiers (Canton of Grisons) led to a flowering of his father's artistic skills and a determination to become a topographer. Eduard Imhof graduated from ETH Zurich as a surveying engineer in 1919 and spent almost all his professional life at the academic Institute of Cartography (which he founded) at that school. He was appointed chairman of an influential group of international cartographers, the ‘Committee of Six', which had met in 1958 in Mainz to discuss the formation of an independent international association for cartography. Imhof was appointed president of this association at its inaugural meeting in Bern in 1959, and was confirmed by election of the first General Assembly of delegates to the ICA in Paris in 1961.

In fact the Committee of Six had been set up somewhat earlier, following an initiative by Professor Mannerfelt. From a commercial map publishing background - he was head of cartography at Esselte in Stockholm - Mannerfelt was convinced of the need for a special organisation to discuss cartographic issues when he attended the Congress of Printing and Allied Industries in Venice in 1954. In the summer of 1956 he was able to invite 35 cartographers from different countries to the Esselte Conference on Applied Cartography. At the final session of the conference a motion was discussed "to form an International Organisation of Applied Cartography. In spite of the existence of the worldwide international organisations for geodesy, geography and photogrammetry, and the cartographical department of the UN, there is no organisation or society which represents the central and specific interests of cartography". Mannerfelt directed further discussions at meetings in Bern in 1957 and Chicago in 1958, before the Mainz meeting in November of that year.

Between them these two European cartographers of differing background and experience led a group of committed individuals to create a confident and effective organisation; not a sub-group of another body (there had been suggestions that the rightful place of cartography was in a sub-commission of the International Geographical Union). It was delighted to return to its birthplace to celebrate fifty years of success, and to look forward.