Gerardus Mercator’s Groundbreaking Projection

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. The name
gerardis Mercator has come up on the show a few times.
He is most well known for making a map projection

(00:25):
that for a while just seemed to be ubiquitous in
classrooms in some parts of the world. So if you're
a little younger than Holly and I are, or maybe
if you grew up somewhere else, this might not have
been your experience, but a whole whole lot of us
learned what the world looked like from a pull down
map mounted over the chalkboard that made Greenland look as

(00:49):
big as Africa, which it definitely is not. Even though
this map projection is way less common in classrooms today,
there's a digital version of it called web Mercater, and
that's become kind of the de facto standard for online maps.
That's what Google Maps uses, although in Google also introduced

(01:09):
the globe mode, which uses a different projection if you
zoom all the way out. So the Mercator projection gets
a lot of grief about how much it distorts the
relative sizes of different land masses. If you're about to
fire off an angry email about us bad mouthing the
Mercator projection, just hang on. Map projections translate a roughly

(01:33):
sphirical planet to a two dimensional image, so all of
them are distorted in some way. You have to distort
something to make that translation work, and the Mercader projection
was actually pretty good at what it was designed to do,
which was to help people navigate long distances at sea.
So that is what we're going to talk about for
today's episode, and just two level set. This is really

(01:56):
about European traditions of map making a navigation, so we're
going to talk about navigation and maps, but we won't
be talking about things like indigenous styles of map making
or Polynesian wayfinding things like that in this episode. They're
outside the scope. So we will start with some of
the highlights from the worlds of cartography and navigation that

(02:16):
led up to Mercat making his projection around the world.
People probably started making maps before developing written languages meant
to represent words, and in general, cultures that did not
develop their own written language did still develop ways of
making and sharing maps. But we don't have surviving examples

(02:37):
of those very earliest maps. The oldest ones that we
do have are comparatively more recent. Yeah, and one of
last year's On Earth episodes, we talked about the sand
Bleak Slab, which dates back so between nineteen hundred and
sixteen fifty BC, and that maybe the oldest known map
of Europe. The am I go Mundy, also called the

(03:00):
Babylonian Map of the World, dates back to about six
hundred BC, and that's the oldest known world map, or
at least as much of the world as was known
to the people who made it. It was at around
this same time that people started figuring out how to
make map projections again, ways to represent a roughly spherical

(03:20):
Earth as a flat image. Greek mathematician the Lease of
my Leadas, who lived in the seventh century b C,
is often credited with making the first map projection, although
he was making star maps rather than a map of
the Earth. This may have been shortly before people started
to figure out that the Earth itself was spherical, but

(03:41):
that's been known since about five dred BC and about
to forty b C. E Aratasthenes of Syrene calculated the
planet's circumference at about thousand stadia. We don't have exact
documentation of the process he used to do this, but
according to Greek geographer Strabo, who lived about two hundred

(04:02):
years later, this involved comparing shadows that were cast at
noon on the summer solstice. So in Signy there was
no shadow that meant the sun was shining straight down,
but in Alexandria a pole in its shadow formed an
angle of about seven point two degrees or about one

(04:24):
a circle. So they had professional surveyors measure the distance
between Signy and Alexandria. That was five thousand stadius, so
five thousand times fifty is two fifty thousand. Today Signy
is as one Egypt. Around the second century BC, Greek
astronomer Hipparchus started using latitude and longitude to describe the

(04:48):
locations of places on the globe. About four hundred years
after that, Greek mathematician and geographer Ptolemy published his treatise
known as the Geography, which documented an establ lished many
of the basic principles of cartography used in the Western
tradition of map making, including various map projections. Magnetic compasses

(05:10):
were first developed in China all the way back in
about two hundred BC, but their first uses for navigational
purposes seemed to have come along a lot later. The
first written reference to navigational compasses in China dates back
to about the year ten forty, and in Europe they
were in use by about the end of the twelfth century.

(05:31):
By about the thirteenth century, navigators in the Mediterranean we're
using Portolan charts to plot their courses. These charts were
usually made on vellum to be more durable, and they
typically showed coastlines and islands labeled with the names of
ports and towns, and the standard was for the names
to be written on the land as much as possible,

(05:51):
not on the water, so that the labeling didn't get
in the way of navigational information. That navigational information was
shown through compass roses. These were marked with wind directions,
both the principal directions like north and southwest and the
half winds like east, northeast and south southwest. It was

(06:12):
shown through straight lines. Also, many of these lines radiating
out like the spokes of a wheel, and these represented
compass bearings. These straight lines are called rum lines or
locks of dromes. If someone were sailing between two ports
connected by a rum line on one of these charts,
they could set their bearing according to the angle of

(06:33):
that line, depending on where they were going. They also
might start along one bearing and then change angles along
the way, or they might use a straight edge to
plot out of course between two points, with the angle
of the straight edge providing the compass bearing. So there's
a little bit of guesswork here, because while some of
these charts have survived until today, there aren't really very

(06:56):
many of them, and there are no surviving instructions of
how to use them. Even the name Portland Charts seems
to have been coined centuries after the charts themselves mostly
fell out of use. The charts most likely to have
survived until today are also library or display copies, not
ones that were actually taken to see. Even even if

(07:19):
it's met have made a vellum to be more durable.
If you take a chart out onto the ocean, it's
going to be damaged by use and exposure to the elements.
We don't really know who made the first one of
these or where, and we don't have early enough versions
of them to kind of suggest how they might have evolved.
As people improved on them. Portland charts, who are mostly

(07:40):
used in Europe from about th hundred to fift hundred.
As far as we know, they worked pretty well for
navigating around bodies of water like the Mediterranean Sea or
the Black Sea or the Atlantic coast of Europe. As
European navigators started voyaging farther away in the sixteenth century,
portaland charts were expanded to include the information they brought

(08:02):
back about the coast of Africa, Asia, and the America's
world maps were also evolving significantly during this same period.
Ptolemy's geography was translated into Latin for the first time
in the early fifteenth century. It had already been translated
into Arabic centuries before that, but once it was available

(08:22):
in Latin, it once again became influential in European map making.
For a while, these portland nautical charts and maps of
the world or particular regions of the world evolved alongside
one another, and they kind of to some extent borrowed
from each other, although sometimes cartographers who were focused on

(08:43):
the geography of the Earth ignored information on charts that
had been made by navigators. The kind of viewed these
navigational charts as inferior, even though often these charts were
more precise and accurate than the maps that they were
working from. Of course, that is the work of learned
men who are actually doing the things, not tradespeople. As

(09:08):
more Europeans crossed the Atlantic and returned to Europe, cartographers
started adding what they found to their maps. In seven
Martin Wald similar printed a world map using a set
of twelve woodblocks. Working with scholar Matthias Ringman. He pulled
in geographic information from multiple sources, including Ptolemy and Marco Polo,

(09:29):
and information from nautical charts detailing the southern coasts of Africa.
He also drew from European explorers accounts of what lay
on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. In particular,
vald Simular and Ringman referenced the work of Italian navigator
Emerigo Vespucci, who's voyages took place between four and fifteen

(09:52):
o four. There are some question marks around Vespucci's voyages,
including some doubts about the authenticity of of the letters
that are attributed to him and described the voyages, but
this map showed a landmass on the other side of
the Atlantic Ocean, a landmass that was separate from Asia.
Of course, Vespucci had no concept of how far to

(10:15):
the west this land mass stretch because his voyages had
mostly stuck to the continent's eastern coast, but vald Simular
called this land mass America after him. Vald Simular's map
was focused on geography, not navigation. He used a variation
on one of Ptolemy's projections called Klamas or Cloak. On

(10:38):
this projection, the lines of latitude and longitude are curved,
making the globe into kind of a drapey, rounded off rectangle.
Vald Simular's map showed landmasses, including the America's as two
narrow continents connected by an isthmus. It also showed some
geographic features like rivers and mountains and lots of place names,

(11:00):
but it didn't have the navigational elements of compass roses
or rum lines. Gerardis Mercater's most famous projection, on the
other hand, combined both navigational and geographic elements, and we
will talk more about that after a quick sponsor break.

(11:25):
Gerardis Mercater was born on March fifteenth, fifteen twelve, in
rupelmonda Flanders, which is now in Belgium. His parents were
Hubert and Emmerantianna Cramer. They named him Gerhard Cramer, and
then he latinized his name during his education, so that
morph from Gerhard to gerardis like, that's pretty straightforward. The

(11:46):
name Kramer meant merchant, and that's MerCad in Latin. Probably
none of this was pronounced the way we do it today.
Hubert was a cobbler and the family really did not
have much money, so Gerhard's uncle Geisberg helped arrange for
his education. Gerhard started out at a school that trained
boys from less well off backgrounds for the priesthood, so

(12:09):
his early education was focused on things like theology and Latin.
In fifteen thirty he enrolled at the University of Louvain
also called the Old University of louven under the name
Gerardis Mercator Rumbelmandanus. He studied philosophy and the humanities, and
he graduated with a master's degree in fifteen thirty two.

(12:29):
Mercator also spent some time trying to reconcile his religious
education with his education and science, particularly conflicts between the
Biblical account of creation and the work of Aristotle. For
about two years, he studied and he corresponded with religious
scholars and Mcellen and Antwerp, both of which were in

(12:50):
the Flemish region of what's now Belgium. In fifteen thirty four,
Mercator married Barbara Skellicons and they eventually had six children
together there Not long after getting married, Mercator started working
with mathematician, cartographer, and instrument maker Gemma Frisius. Marcator had
studied with Frisius at the university, and the two men

(13:12):
teamed up with goldsmith Gaspar Vander Hayden also known as
Gaspar America, to make scientific instruments and globes, and together
they made a globe of the Earth in fifteen thirty
six and a celestial globe in fifteen thirty seven. Mercator
was also making maps of his own. In fifteen thirty seven,
he made a map of what's now Egypt, Israel, and Palestine,

(13:35):
and that was printed across six sheets. This is a
pretty big map. There's some speculation that he chose this
region for one of his first solo map projects because
of his interest in Christianity. A year later, Marcador finished
his first world map. This map was a double cortiform projection,
shaped roughly like two hearts lying on their sides with

(13:57):
their points touching in the center of the map. The
northern hemisphere is on one heart and the southern hemispherre
is on the other. Like vald Similar, Mercater used the
name America, in this case spelled with an E on
the end. As he was working on these maps, Mercater
was also working as an instrument maker and an engraver,

(14:17):
and he was becoming really well respected in all of
these fields. In fifteen forty he published his first book,
which was a treatise on the Italic lettering that he
was using for his maps. The title of this treatise
translated as the idea of writing Latin letters, which they
call Italic or Cursive. He also carved the wood blocks

(14:38):
that were used to illustrate the letters in this text.
Mercater thought that Italic type was a lot more legible
than other styles of lettering, and he advocated for its
use in map making to try to make the maps
more readable. In fifteen forty, at the request of Flemish
map makers, Mercater also made a map of Flanders. One

(14:59):
he started focusing on making globes. This was something that
required a huge amount of skill. The globe maker had
to create a set of flat gores that would all
line up correctly once they were mounted onto a sphere.
In Mercat made a navigator's globe using twelve gores with
caps for the north and south poles. This was marked

(15:21):
with lines of longitude and latitude, and with rum lines
that were connecting different points and fanning out from compass roses.
This was the first known time that someone included rum
lines on a globe, and a note on that. As
we said earlier, on a flat map, a rum line
is a straight line connecting two points, but that's not

(15:43):
the shortest path between the two points. That would be
the great circle path. Imagine connecting two points on a
globe with string and pulling that string as tight as possible,
and if you extend the ends of the string until
they encircle the whole world, creating circle whose center is
at the center of the earth, that is a great circle.

(16:05):
The lines of longitude on a globe are all great circles,
as is the equator, but the rest of the lines
of latitude are not. Since the center of the circle
they make isn't also the center of the earth. A
navigator following a rum line from a flat map sets
a compass bearing and follows it, but following a great
circle path requires continually shifting directions to move in a curve.

(16:30):
And while rub lines are straight lines on a flat map,
if you draw them on a globe, they eventually form
into spirals if they get long enough, with the spiral
getting smaller the closer it gets to the polls. So
setting a compass bearing wants to travel along a rum
line from a map, It's probably the easier way because
you set your heading one time and then you follow it,

(16:52):
but it would not be shorter, especially over very long distances.
Portuguese scholar Pedro Nownus articulated the difference between rome lines
and great circles in a treatise he wrote, including Treatise
on Certain Doubts of Navigation in fifteen thirty seven, so
back to Mercader. He was doing this work as the
counter Reformation was starting to develop in parts of Europe.

(17:15):
This was a Catholic response to the Protestant Reformation, with
the Roman Inquisition established in fifteen forty two in an
effort to combat what the Catholic Church saw as heresy.
In fifteen forty four, forty three residents of Leuven were
arrested for heresy, and one of those people was Girardis Mercader.

(17:36):
When Marcador was arrested, he was actually back in Ruplemanda.
His uncle Jeezbert had died and Mercator had gone back
to settle his affairs. But authorities framed this trip as
a flight from justice, and they were also really suspicious
of that earlier correspondence he'd had with religious scholars. MerCad
was arrested and imprisoned for seven months, as his wife

(17:58):
and their parish curate and various other people tried to
get him freed. Four of the people who were arrested
at the same time as Mercader was we're all executed.
It is not clear why Mercador was ultimately released, and
it's also not entirely clear what his religious convictions actually were.
Different historians have come too vastly different conclusions based on

(18:22):
the information that's available. He lived in a predominantly Protestant area,
but after all this he still had Catholic patrons, and
Catholics still bought and used his maps in about fifteen
fifty two, Mercater moved to Duisburg, where he lectured at
the University of Duisburg and helped establish a school. He

(18:42):
taught math and helped create the mathematics curriculum. There, he
became friends with John d who later became an advisor
to Queen Elizabeth the First. Mercader also made more maps,
including new maps of various parts of Europe and maps
that were based on the earlier work of Ptolemy. He
was not doing all of this map making work by himself.

(19:02):
He had a whole staff of cartographers and mathematicians, and
for maps that were in color, there were also colorists
who were typically women. In fifteen fifty four, Mercater made
a map of Britain that has raised some questions. It
wasn't as accurate or up to date as some other
maps of the area that were already in use at
the time, and it didn't note several bishoprics that Henry

(19:25):
the eighth had established after breaking with Rome and establishing
himself as head of the Church of England two decades prior.
It is not clear whether this is just because mer
Cater was working with older sources for some reason, or
if he thought including those bishoprics would offend his more
staunchly Catholic patrons. Mercater created another map of England, Scotland

(19:48):
and Ireland about a decade later, and that was far
more complete by the fifteen sixties. Regardless of all that,
mar Cater was a highly respected map maker and an
instrument maker and an engraver, and in fifteen sixty four
he was appointed court cosmographer to Duke phil Him of Clive.
A few years after that he made his most famous

(20:09):
map projection, and we'll get to that after a sponsor break.
In fifteen sixty nine, Gerardis Mercator published a map of
the world that was intended to be used for c navigation.
He titled this New and Augmented Description of the Earth

(20:33):
Corrected for Use in Navigation. He described what he had
done as squaring the Circle. This was a big map,
printed over eighteen sheets and in total measuring two hundred
two by a hundred and twenty four centimeters or seventy
nine by almost fifty inches. Only three original copies of

(20:53):
this map remain today, at least that we know of.
There was a fourth one still in existence at the
start of the twentieth century, but it was destroyed during
World War two. Mrcater had created a cylindrical projection of
the Earth. All the lines of longitude were parallel, and
they intersected at ninety degree angles with all the lines
of latitude on a globe. The lines of longitude converge

(21:17):
as they approached the north and south poles, so mrcater
had to stretch everything out to make the line straight
and parallel. Instead, the farther something was from the equator,
the more he had to stretch it out, and as
part of this stretch, the lines of latitude are progressively
farther apart the farther they are from the polls. Mrcater

(21:39):
didn't explain exactly how he did this. It was not
as simple as just drawing a bunch of lines on
paper with a straight edge and then filling in the
map details. There was a lot of math involved in
creating the lines of latitude and longitude and spacing them
out correctly, and in adjusting the sizes and the shapes
of all the land masses. But the math that Mercador

(22:00):
had access to wasn't as advanced as the math that
exists today. For example, calculus that would not be invented
for more than a hundred more years. There is still
speculation today about exactly what mathematical and cartographic steps Mercader
took to make this projection. He may not have been

(22:21):
the first person to create a projection like this, though
German astronomer, instrument maker and cartographer Earhart Etslau made a
map known as the compass map in fifteen eleven, with
another version in One of these maps has survived on
the lid of a portable sundial, and it has similar
spacing noted for the lines of latitude, but this map

(22:44):
is also quite small, so it's hard to tell the details.
It's not clear whether Mercador knew about this map or
whether it may have inspired him to try something similar. Regardless,
as we said on Mercator's projection, the lines of longitude
and latitude intersected one another at right angles. This map

(23:04):
was covered in rum lines that radiated out from central points,
and if you put a straight edge down on the map,
you could draw a line between any two points and
that would cross the meridians at the same angle from
ends to end. You could measure that angle, and that
was your compass bearing for your journey. This was not

(23:25):
a completely perfect system. Ships don't travel in straight lines,
especially when they're powered by sale. There are variations in
wind and current and other factors involved. Mariners in Europe
had been using astrolabes to figure out their latitude since
about the middle of the fifteenth century, but they didn't
yet have a good way to measure their longitude. That

(23:46):
continued to be an issue until the eighteenth century. Then
we have an episode on that in the archive. The
Earth's magnetic field also isn't quite as orderly and uniform
as it was believed to be at the time. People
knew that the geographic and the magnetic north poles were
not in the exact same spot, but the details of

(24:09):
that weren't fully understood. People in China had measured the
difference between the magnetic and geographic north pole for the
first time all the way back in about the year
seven twenty, but Europeans didn't make note of it until
roughly seven hundred more years after that. The first precise
measurement of magnetic declination, which is the difference in those

(24:31):
two things. The first precise measurement of that in Europe
took place in fifteen ten, and when Mercatur made this
map almost sixty years later. There were still lots of
questions about how that angle varied around the globe, and
while the America's were somewhat expanded from the way they
were shown in the vald Simular map on Mercaturs fifteen

(24:53):
sixty nine map, they still were not nearly as accurate
or detailed as Europe, Asia and Africa were. This map
showed things like rivers, mountains, and towns, but far fewer
of those are noted in the America's. Europeans had not
set foot on Australia at all, so that continent marked
as Nova Guinea is a featureless blob. Okay, it's just

(25:15):
like a spot there on the map, roughly the same shape,
not exactly it's Australia ish. Yeah. The western coast of
the America's is also like not it's not shaped exactly right.
I mean, there's there was a lot that was still
a work in progress, but still this is a huge
advance for European navigators. It was a flat map intended

(25:37):
for navigation at see, showing as much of the world
as Europeans knew about, and it would allow a sailor
to plot out a course by drawing a line with
a straight edge, as is often the case, though it
took a while for it to really catch on. In
the meantime, Mr Cat kept working on other projects, including
working on a collection of maps that he planned to

(25:59):
call and at Us, taking the name from the Titan
from Greek mythology, who holds up to heavens. This was
the first use of atlas to mean a collection of maps.
In fifteen sixty nine, he also published a chronology of
the world from the creation to at the time the present.
He planned to include this chronology as the first part

(26:20):
of his Atlas. This chronology included things like astronomical events,
so stuff like eclipses. There were also historical events and
moments from the Bible. This chronology wound up being banned
in some places because it included a number of events
that were related to the Protestant Reformation. In fifteen seventy eight,
he published another work that it would eventually be part

(26:42):
of the atlas. That was a collection of twenty seven
of Ptolemy's maps with corrections and commentary. Then in the
fifteen eighties he published two collections of maps, both titled
Atlas or Cosmographic meditations on the Fabric of the World
and the Figure of the Fabric. One of these came
out in fifteen eighty five, the other came out in

(27:03):
fifteen eighty nine. Mercader's plan and his goal for all
of this was to include maps of all of Europe
and his atlas, but before he was able to finish that,
he died on December two fifty four. He had had
a series of strokes starting in fifteen ninety and had
become partially paralyzed, and his work on this had slowed

(27:25):
down as a result of all of that. His son
rum Old, finished as much as he could and published
the final edition of Mercader's Atlas in five It included
the seventy four maps that had been part of Mercader's
earlier two editions, along with twenty eight more. Some of
these maps were based on Ptolemy's work and some were

(27:45):
Mercader's own. In the end, Spain and Portugal were mostly
left out of the atlas because Mercater had not been
able to make those maps yet. Eventually, Mercater's sons sold
the plates that were used to print the atlas to
graver and publisher Yodokus Hondius. Handias added more maps and
published another version in sixteen o six that became known

(28:08):
as the Mercatur Hondius Atlas. Thirty different editions of the
Mercater Hondius Atlas were published in various languages between sixteen
o six and sixteen forty one. Although Hondias had bought
the plates outright and could just do whatever he wanted
to with them, he kept Mercad's name on the atlas,
in part because it just had so much respected name recognition.

(28:31):
People were also making improvements and adjustments to Mercat's fifteen
sixty nine world map. Thomas Harriet, who was working for
Sir Walter Raleigh, created tables of meridional parts along with
Edward Wright. These allowed other map makers to lay out
the longitude and latitude grid that Mercater had used. We

(28:51):
also have an entire episode on Thomas Harriet in the Archives.
Right often get Soul credit for these tables because they
were published under his name as part of his fift
Certain errors in navigation arising either of the ordinary erroneous
making or using of the c chart, compass, cross staff,
and tables of declination of the sun and fixed stars

(29:16):
detected and corrected. Also, in fifteen nine, British geographer Richard
Hacklett incorporated a map that Wright had drawn based on
Mercator's projection in his Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffics and Discoveries
of the English Nation. This map corrected some inaccuracies and

(29:36):
mercaters work, and it was really after this point that
the Mercader projection started to get a lot more practical
use for nautical navigation. The Mercader projection was also part
of Robert Dudley's sixteen forty seven c atlas and Edmund
Halley's meteorological maps. In seventeen sixty nine, Benjamin Franklin and

(29:57):
whaling captain Timothy Folger made a of the Gulf Stream
based on a Mercater projection. By the nineteenth century, Mercater
based maps were well established for navigational purposes, and into
the twentieth century, different variations on the Mercater projection were
also used for things like calculating missile trajectories. Although the

(30:18):
Mercater projection is still used for navigation in some contexts,
and like we said at the top of the show,
pretty much all online maps are using it in some cases,
it has been supplanted by things like GPS. But the
thing that most people are probably the most familiar with,
at least if you're older than thirty five or so,

(30:38):
is maps used in school, especially these pulled down maps
that could be mounted on a wall. Mercater wall maps
for schools became increasingly popular as the maps were becoming
more widely accepted for c navigation, so more of them
were made by the eighteenth century, and then they became
seemingly entrenched by the nineteenth century. Some of this was

(31:02):
probably just because people thought a map that was being
so widely used for navigation must be the most accurate map,
but of course companies were also making more of these
maps in response to that demand, which meant if you
needed to go buy a map for your school, that
was probably going to be the one most readily available
to buy. This is just not a great map for

(31:24):
learning what the world looks like, though. It wildly distorts
the relative size of various land masses, with that distortion
getting worse the farther away you get from the equator.
So just like we said at the top of the show,
it makes Greenland look as big as Africa. Africa is
really more than fourteen times larger than Greenland, so that's

(31:45):
a mess. The continent of Africa is larger than the
United States, India, and China combined, but you would not
know that by looking at a Mercater projection. Antarctica also
looks truly enormous. The website the True size dot Com
has a dragon drop tool that people can use to

(32:06):
compare how big different countries and regions really are. Added
to that and the Mercader projection North is up and
Europe is roughly in the center of the map, Mercador
was definitely not the first person to do this. Ptolemy
also made maps in which North was up. The Waldsimuler
map that we discussed earlier also had North at the

(32:28):
top and Europe roughly in the center. If you look
at a really old maps that are not with the
North is up standards, some of them have South up
or East up like that. Other directions can be up. Uh.
There is an argument that the Mercader projections ubiquity, combined
with these size differences and North being up and Europe
being roughly in the middle, that makes this a particularly

(32:51):
eurocentric map. Also, maybe not intentionally and maybe not consciously
but in Western culture, bigger is often seen as better,
and things on top are often seen as being more
important than things on the bottom. There's not a lot
of data to back up the idea that in the
real world, mercater projections make people think the northern hemisphere,

(33:14):
particularly Europe, is the biggest, most important thing on the planet.
But still for a lot of us, that is the
mental image we have, with Europe at the heart of
it and the global North towering over the global South.
There have also been times when the Mercader projection has
been put to an intentionally explicitly political use. I mean,

(33:34):
you could argue that all maps are political, but this
and this thing I'm about to talk about definitely done
for political reasons. So, for example, during the Cold War,
the Mercader projection could make a great backdrop for people
who were hyping up the dangers of communism, because if
you had a map in which the Soviet Union and

(33:55):
China were both bright red, that definitely made it look
like there was this huge hostile presence that was about
to overshadow the rest of the world. By the latter
half of the twentieth century, other projections had mostly replaced
the mer Cater projection in Atlas is. The last Atlas
using the Mercater projection for a map of the world
was printed in nineteen sixty six. A number of other

(34:18):
projections were used in its place. One was the Winkle
triple projection made by Oswald Winkle in This is called
the triple projection and that's spelled t R I p
e L because it tried to minimize three of the
types of distortion that are part of map projections, those
three being area, direction and distance. National Geographic has used

(34:41):
the Winkle triple projection a lot. In nineteen sixty three,
the Robinson projection, made by Arthur H. Robinson, was focused
more on retaining the look of all the land masses
in relation to one another, rather than trying to accurately
preserve any specific measurement like distance or area. So most

(35:02):
map projections involved making choices of which measurements to preserve
and which aspects to distort to make up for preserving
those other elements, but the Robinson projection was more generally
trying to make a map that looked right. In the
nineteen seventies, historian Arno Peter started promoting a projection that
he called the Peters projection, which is known as the

(35:24):
Gall Peters projection because it is identical to an eighteen
fifty five projection by James Gall. This is an equal
area projection. It preserves the area of the landmasses while
distorting things like shape and distance to compensate. Peters proposed
this as an alternative to Mercater, one that he argued

(35:45):
with superior because it preserved the relative area of all
of the different countries, rather than exaggerating the size of
some countries as compared to others. There's the thing, though,
by the time Peters made this argument, Mercater projections were
no longer being printed in Atlas IS, and there were
already multiple other projections to choose from. That we're less

(36:07):
visually distorted than the Mercader projection is, and the Gall
Peters projection that he was promoting as an alternative that's
extremely distorted. Also, So while the Mercader projection makes things
bigger the farther they are from the equator, the Gall
Peters projection sort of just elongates everything. It looks weirdly

(36:28):
stretched out. So it makes sense to use the Gall
Peters projection as a counterpoint to the Mercader projection to
like illustrate how different projections distort things differently, and how
those distortions can have social and political implications. But if
your goal is to teach kids what the planet looks like, uh,
and how various nations and regions are situated in relation

(36:50):
to one another, it is still not a great map.
But Peter's got a lot of attention when he made
this argument in the seventies and today in number of
social organizations whose work is focused on the global South
use it and since seen Boston public schools. For some reason.
The idea of using gol Peters instead of Mercator was

(37:13):
also even on an episode of the political drama The
West Wing. Yeah. Um, I have not watched that show,
and no one needs to tell me that I need
to go watch it. Really, It's it's okay, but I've
watched that scene. And in addition to sort of I
mean like we should use the gall Peters protection, they
also turn it so that South is up uh, And

(37:35):
one of the characters is like, that's freaking me out.
Um it does? It does? It looks very strange to
have a south pointing up Golpeters projection. Um. There are
also still new map projections being developed, including one that
was announced just in one which I think is pretty cool.
This was developed by j. Richard Got, Robert Vanderby, and

(37:58):
David Goldberg, and it is a double aid a disc
or you could just put the two discs side by side.
I guess. Uh. The northern hemisphere is on one, the
southern hemisphere is on the other. Goldberg and Got had
previously developed a system to evaluate how much different map
projections distorted the globe, and they rated six factors which

(38:19):
were local shapes, areas, distances, flection or bending, skewness or lopsidedness,
and boundary cuts or continuity gaps. And this rating system
that they made lower scores are better. So the Winkle
triple that we talked about that tried to specifically minimize
three types of distortion, that scored a four point five

(38:40):
six three. The Mercader projection is almost double that at
eight point to nine six. Uh. If they said what
the gall Peters was, I didn't find it. But this
new map is zero point eight eight one, so we
less distortion. It's a little interesting to look at it
because it does have like one hemisphere on one disc

(39:02):
and one on the other disc, which, if you're expecting
to see the whole map in one place, is a
little unusual, but it's a cool thing to look at
in my opinion. Do you also have a little bit
of listener mail to cap off this this map fun?
I sure do I have this listener mail? It is
from Danny. Danny wrote, First off, I had an amazing

(39:24):
time in Italy with y'all. Thank you so much for
being such gracious hosts. I'm clearly behind on my listening,
but I finally got to the Rabies episode and it
brought back memories. My very first patient ever in the
e R was a Raby's Exposure who was out running
and possibly bitten by bats because he noted in the podcast,
Raby's immune globulin dosing isn't huge needles being jabbed into

(39:45):
your abdomen, but it's still a decent amount of shots.
It's a weight based amount, but it's still a fair
amount of injections, and the immune got globulin can't be
in the same muscle as the injection. It took me
in a pharmacist forever to map out injection sites for
this poor patient. Since then, I've yet to give the
immune globulin again, but I gave tons of RABY shots.

(40:07):
To this day, I'm so grateful that it and many
other kinds of vaccines exist. Thank you for all you
do to bring order to the history cows and then
in parentheses chaos. I'm going to explain that inside joke
in a minute. That was from Danny. So yes, Danny,
thank you so much for this note. Thank you for

(40:27):
coming to Italy with us. We did finally take our
trip to Italy. Um Danny, the woman who gets things done,
that's what I call her now. Yes, uh, Um, we
we did take our trip to Italy. Holly and I
both had some apprehensions about taking the trip while the

(40:48):
pandemic is still going on, but we did it. We
made it. We all tried to be as safe as possible. Uh.
And all of the hiccups that we had were unrelated
to COVID. Almost everyone had their flights canceled, though because
and Danny was on our flight out of Florence, so

(41:08):
she didn't have her first one canceled, but she had
some problems down the road. It was a little bit
of a wild time. Yeah. I felt guilty because I
think we were the only ones that made it home smoothly.
Brian and I. Yeah, there was a there was a
transit strike in Italy on the day that most people
were leaving, and a lot of people's flights were messed
up as a result. I was staying a few days

(41:31):
later to see Venice before we went home, so I
did not have that effect either. But I did want to.
I wanted to read this number one because uh great
first person experienced about Raby's immune globulin. I also just
wanted to say thank you to everybody who came to
Italy with us, because so many people were so patient

(41:51):
over so many years before we were able to take
that trip, Like we had two plus years of postponements
on the trip before we were able to take it
um and everyone was so gracious and so lovely, and
we had a really good time, and one of the
most magical things I have ever experienced happened, which is
the reference at the end of this about the history cows.

(42:12):
So if you go to the Vatican City museums and
to see the Sistine Chapel, you're not supposed to talk
in the Sistine Chapel. So the tour guide a lot
of time will tell you, like what you're going to
see in the Sistine Chapel before you get in there.
And so, as our Italian tour guide was explaining what
we were going to see in the Sistine Chapel, she said,

(42:33):
in the beginning, it was only cows, and God had
to separate the cows into the light and the dark.
And I had this moment where I was like, what
is happening? Did Terry Pratchett right this presentation? Yeah, I
don't remember cows from Sunday School? And then I realized
that she was saying chaos. And it was just one

(42:56):
of the most unexpected and beautiful and wonder full moments
in like language barrier that I have ever experienced. I
hope no one ever corrects her or makes her feel
bad about it, because it delighted me so much. And
for the whole rest of the trip, occasionally I would
just look at my spouse and go, in the beginning,

(43:17):
it was only cows. Uh. And then it turns out
even though you're not supposed to talk in the Sistine Chapel,
boy does everyone's talking the Sistine Chapel anyway? It was
very loud. And then the next day after we were there,
Jason Momoa went in there and sick a selfie and
got in trouble. Um. Yeah, you're not supposed to take pictures,

(43:37):
you're not supposed to speak, you're supposed to wear your
mask at all times. Pretty sloppy, geloppy in adherence to
those rules. Although security is trying, but like it is
literally a room full of people not abiding by the rules,
so they can't really manage it all. Yeah. I think
of all the places we went overall, um, the Vatican

(44:00):
City museums were like the most mask compliance, and then
my own experience personally was just progressively less mask wearing.
And so we got to Venice where it felt like
no one had a mask on and everyone was coughing,
and I was like, come on now I got to
take a COVID test to go home. So cool. Yeah. Yeah,

(44:22):
most of Italy, I mean, I will definitely say most
of Italy is more is still being way more careful
than most of our communities that I have visited in
the US in recent times, which was nice and made
me feel a lot better about being able to get home.
But yes, there were definitely some Yeah, and I would
say our group, our group was a careful group we had.

(44:44):
The eating indoors was the rare exception for me. Most
of my meals were outside, masks on inside, and did
everything we could to make it a a safe trip
for everybody, which I think mostly worked out. Knock on woods.
So thank you again everybody who wents Italy with us
and for bearing with us for two plus years of

(45:08):
postponent I know not everybody was able to make the
final date that the that we were able to go,
but UM, I'm glad we were finally able to take
the trip. We are hoping to have other trips in
the future. We as of this moment that I'm talking
into this microphone, we have not actively started planning one,
but we do hope to have other trips. We have
kicked some ideas around, but nothing is nothing is congealing

(45:30):
yet and again with the hope that the that the
pandemic slowly moves towards being under control, it does feel
continuing to be chaotic. Obviously, we had a whole other
conversation of can we actually take this trip uh back

(45:51):
in the earlier spring before ultimately deciding to take the trip.
So thanks to everybody for your patients with that, UM,
Sorry to the folks who did want to them with
us and weren't able to come with us for whatever reason.
Hopefully in the future more trips. If you'd like to
write to us for history podcasts that I heart radio
dot com. We're all over social media and missed in History.

(46:11):
That's where you'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, in Instagram,
and you can subscribe to our show on iHeart radio
app or wherever you get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed
in History Class is a production of I heart Radio.
For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the iHeart
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your

(46:34):
favorite shows.

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