Map Making
Jerry Brotton argues in his book, A History of the World in 12 Maps , that mapmaking has always been a contentious topic, from Ptolemy to Google Maps. Or at least that’s what one book review says. Maps always “shaped—and were shaped by—various political, religious and social movements” , says the review. There were 3 maps I found interesting from his list. The first was the eponymous Mercator map, the one we have all grown up from school, named after the Belgian cartographer Gerard Mercator. It was drawn way back in 1569 and has surprisingly never been improved on, despite its obvious drawback. As a less than 7 year old, I remember a jigsaw puzzle of the world’s map that made it look like Greenland was bigger than India! Wikipedia goes one further and points out that : “Greenland takes as much space on the map as Africa, when in reality Africa's area is 14 times greater.” The cause of such severe distortion is obvious: The Mercator map attempts to “chart the contours of ...