Bruno Hassenstein was a German cartographer who was born in Ruhla

Ruhla

Ruhla is a town situated in the forest of Thuringia in the district of Wartburgkreis in Germany, immediately next to the Rennsteig. Thal and Kittelsthal are parts of the town.-Church of St. Concordia:...

, Thuringia

Thuringia

The Free State of Thuringia is a state of Germany, located in the central part of the country.It has an area of and 2.29 million inhabitants, making it the sixth smallest by area and the fifth smallest by population of Germany's sixteen states....

.

From 1854 he worked and studied cartography under August Petermann in Gotha

Gotha (town)

Gotha is a town in Thuringia, within the central core of Germany. It is the capital of the district of Gotha.- History :The town has existed at least since the 8th century, when it was mentioned in a document signed by Charlemagne as Villa Gotaha . Its importance derives from having been chosen in...

. Here he drew numerous maps for Petermann's geographical journal- Mittellungen, and became known for his outstanding work performed on maps of Africa. In 1866 he relocated to Berlin

Berlin

Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...

, where one of his duties was cartographical work for Karl Klaus von der Decken

Karl Klaus von der Decken

Baron Karl Klaus von der Decken was a German explorer of eastern Africa and the first European to attempt to climb Mount Kilimanjaro....

's publication- Reisen in Ostafrika.

In 1868 Hassenstein returned to Gotha, where he created maps for Heinrich Theodor Menke

Heinrich Theodor Menke

Heinrich Theodor Menke was a German geographer who was a native of Bremen. He is remembered for his work in historical geography....

's edition of Spruner's

Karl Spruner von Merz

Karl Spruner von Merz , or Karl von Spruner as he preferred to be known, was a German cartographer and scholar.He spent most of his long life in military service. He joined the Bavarian army, aged 11, in 1814, and was promoted to lieutenant in 1825...

 atlas

Atlas

An atlas is a collection of maps; it is typically a map of Earth or a region of Earth, but there are atlases of the other planets in the Solar System. Atlases have traditionally been bound into book form, but today many atlases are in multimedia formats...

 of medieval history (Handatlas für die Geschichte des Mittelalters und der neuern Zeit). In 1878 he became editor of the cartography section of the Mittellungen, and in 1885 performed mapmaking work for the Atlas von Japan, a highly regarded work with charts that were drawn to 1:100000 scale.

During his career Hassenstein edited and published maps based on the observations of several celebrated explorers and travellers, that included Wilhelm Junker

Wilhelm Junker

Wilhelm Junker was a Russian explorer of Africa. He was of German descent.He was born in Moscow. He studied medicine at Dorpat, Göttingen, Berlin and Prague, but did not practise for long...

, Emin Pasha

Emin Pasha

Mehmed Emin Pasha — he was born Isaak Eduard Schnitzer and baptized Eduard Carl Oscar Theodor Schnitzer — was a physician, naturalist, and governor of the Egyptian province of Equatoria on the upper Nile...

, Hans Meyer

Hans Meyer (geologist)

Hans Heinrich Josef Meyer was a German geographer from Hildburghausen, who was the son of publisher Herrmann Julius Meyer . Hans Meyer is credited with being the first European to reach the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro 5,895 m...

, Ernst Marno

Ernst Marno

Ernst Marno was an Austrian explorer in East Africa. He traveled extensively through the Blue Nile area and the Sudanese-Ethiopian borderland, as well as Kordofan and southern Sudan. His experiences were narrated in two books...

, Friedrich Gerhard Rohlfs

Friedrich Gerhard Rohlfs

Friedrich Gerhard Rohlfs was a German geographer, explorer, author and adventurer.He was born at Vegesack, now part of Bremen. There was much pressure on Rohlfs to be in the medicine field, and he eventually joined the French Foreign Legion in a medical capacity...

, Oskar Baumann

Oscar Baumann

Oscar Baumann was an Austrian cartographer with a keen interest in ethnography.He attended classes on natural history and geography at the University of Vienna, and in 1885 was part of an Austrian exploratory expedition of the Congo Basin headed by Oskar Lenz. However, he had to leave the...

, Friedrich Bohndorff

Friedrich Bohndorff

Friedrich Bohndorff was a German researcher and ornithologist.Initially apprenticed as a goldsmith, Bohndorff embarked on a journey in 1871 to Egypt, where he spent a few years learning Arabic in Cairo. In 1880 he participated on an expedition to the African interior under the leadership of...

 and Sven Hedin

Sven Hedin

Sven Anders Hedin KNO1kl RVO was a Swedish geographer, topographer, explorer, photographer, and travel writer, as well as an illustrator of his own works...

. In 1887 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Göttingen.