I found an old Swedish military rulebook, printed in 1904, that is a translation of an older German Kriegsspiel rulebook by Friedrich Immanuel 1901. It has a chapter on the pieces to use for military wargames that includes a paragraph that in a quick translation (by me) reads:
"Another type of figure troop markers have in a particularly clever way been thought out by Major Christ and found quick spread. In this apparatus the different unit types and units are presented by small figures, whose foot plates are made in the scale 1:8000. So for instance a marching infantryman represents a company in column, a prone infantryman a regiment in line, riders in different poses squadrons and regiments, a gun a battery, etc"
(There is an American translation of that same rulebook from 1907, but I can't find it online. It probably has a better translation than what I could come up with.)
1:8000 is the same as the map scale, so the invention mentioned is to put miniatures on a base that gives them the correct ground-scale (even if the miniature itself is not). I can't google any information about that Major Christ though. Was he the inventor of using based miniatures for wargames? Or was he the inventor of using miniature bases of the correct ground scale? Any expert in miniatures history here that can provide some more information?
See here for slightly more info about that game and some context: link
