History Of Maps
WELCOME
A globe is the best way to show geographic locations in relationship to one another.
This fact was realised as early as the second century by Greek scholar Claudius Ptolemy - pictured above.
The problem for Ptolemy however was how to represent this as a flat image.
His first map, although recognisable today, was grossly exaggerated and geographically inaccurate.
It wasn't until 1507, when Martin Waldseemuller - pictured above - created his map by peeling the globe like an orange and laying the pieces flat, that there was a more accurate image.
He was the first cartographer to separate the continents of America and Asia by sea.
This sea as we know today as the Pacific Ocean was named by Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan, the first man to circumnavigate the world.
The foremost cartographer of the age of discovery was Geradus Mercator - pictured above - whose map of the world of 1538, showed the two polar regions at the top and bottom of the map, and introduced numbered cylindrical projection lines from top to bottom and side to side, thus representing, a flat globe more accurately. These lines are called Mercator's Lines, and have been used in map making ever since, and for centuries have been used by navigators to chart journeys by sea.
Today maps are reproduced by using the following lines to divide them;
The lines of latitude start at 0 degrees at the Equatorial Line at intervals of 15 degrees until 90 degrees, up or down to it's respective pole.
(Read our page - major-circles-of-latitude)
The lines of longtitude are seen as 0 degrees at the pole's centre and spaced at 15 degree intervals up to 180 degrees.This central line runs through Greenwich in London, England, which is where Greenwich Mean Time, now known as UTC or Universal Time, is collated.
(Read our page - lines-of-longtitude)
The Equatorial Line and the lines of Cancer and Capricorn are also used on maps, and these too have definite latitudes, with the Equator situated at 0 degrees, The Tropic of Cancer situated at 23 degrees north of the Equator and the Tropic of Capricorn situated 23 degrees south of the Equator.
The Arctic and Antarctic Circles are also shown on maps, with the Arctic Circle situated 66 degrees north of the Equator and the Antarctic Circle situated 66 degrees south of the Equator.
The International date line, situated at 180 degrees longtitude, the Prime Meridian, also known as the Greenwich Meridian, situated at 0 degrees longtitude, and Time Zones, set at twenty four regular lines of longtitude, are also shown on maps, but these do not define a map, the map defines them.
THE ARNO PETERS MAP OF THE WORLD
Man has produced maps for as long as he has walked the earth. Ancient cave drawings have revealed prehistoric man's attempts at mapping his environment by way of pictures depicting mountains, rivers and forests. Historians believe these pictures were early man's way of charting areas of food and water supplies.
It was the Ancient Greeks who made the first serious attempts at trying to chart the earth, and subsequent generations have followed suit ever since.
The first recognisable map, although grossly exaggerated and geographically incorrect, was produced by scholar Claudius Ptolemy in the second century.his maps and updated variants of it continued in use for the next thoousand years until in the fourteenth century, when man began to explore and travel upon the seven seas, a foremost cartographer of the day, Martin Waldseemuller, created a map of the lands and seas by means of peeling the earth like an orange and laying the pieces flat.
This became a much more accurate image and heralded the use of the first globe.
it wasn't until 1538 that Gerard Mercator introduced numbered, cylindrical, projection lines, from top to bottom and side to side, that an accurate image of what has become today's image of a map of the world, came into being.
These lines, called Mercator's Lines, originally used to chart sea voyages and to segment the globe into north and south, east and west, have been used on maps ever since.
Today we use various methods for charting the world, from Martin Waldseemuller's globe to many differing types of flat map.
Politcal maps that chart countries boundaries,physical maps that chart the earth's geographical features and digital maps that take real time photos of the planet from many miles up in space.
When we look at old maps today, we laugh when we see the odd images that the scholars of that day and age portayed, the elongated images of Africa and South America, the smaller expanses of North America, a large India and an unusually shaped Australia and the ever present central core of a much smaller Europe.
Europe was used as the central image on a map after the International Meridian Conference of 1884 designated Greenwich in London, England as the world's Prime Meridian for the world's time zones.
This along with Mercator's projection of the world, moved places on the map so that they fell under correct compass bearings, but in achieving this, the lines of latitude were moved further apart, actually giving us a distorted view of the lay of the land
Waldseemuller's cylindrical projection and variants of it, portray countries at the Equator as fairly accurate, but seriously distort those nearer the poles, by way of squeezing the lines of latitude nearer together.
The compass bearings of North, South, East and West are portrayed correctly, but more intermediate points, such as north east or south west, can not be plotted by straight lines, so again are portrayed in a seriously distorted way.
The Aitoff projection, a more rounded grid sequence of map charting, the preferred shape used today to depict satellite images of the world, loses fidelity of the world's axis points, thus stretching the image of countries middle way on a map as being much wider than they actually are, resulting in a seriously distorted image of countries at the top and bottom of maps.
This was first noticed by German philosopher / historian / geographer, Arno Peters in 1952
When he looked at old maps of the world, which were charted in an age of innocence purely as a guide for mariners and navigators at sea, he began to wonder if these maps were perhaps more accurate than we realise.
He believed that we have been conditioned to accept what we have been told by a power better informed than ourselves, and therefore we accept the images we have been presented with.
We all know that the world, as a planet, is round, so to portray these curved images onto a flat image, seriously changes the shape of certain countries, showing a tiny India and China, two of the world's largest expanses, a squared off Australia and an extortionately large Europe and U.S.A.
With the advent of digital imagery in cartographics today, we should be seeing a much clearly defined view of the earth's land masses, but still the projections look like they always have.
This is because, our satellite images are taken from many hundreds of pictures, which are then joined together to complete the whole image.
For many years, Peter's observations were just considered the ramblings of an excentric, but in recent years more and more people are becoming to believe, that Peter's assumptions of the world being portrayed so as to give greater importance to certain countries, is much more credible than we have been led to believe.
A REGULAR MAP OF THE WORLD
