In 1569 a cartographer living in Germany called Gerhard Kremer produced a solution - and published it under his Latin name of Mercator. For drawing a line at 45 degrees on this map would not show him which places lay northwest of his starting point the map did not have what cartographers call 'angular fidelitv'. But when it came to setting an intermediate course, like north-west, he would have been in trouble. The captain could thus set his compass and sail off with every hope of reaching a destination along any of these directions. True, it would have shown them which countries lay directly north or south of each other and which were directly east or west. This kind of map would have been of only limited use to the early navigators of sailing ships. The horizontal circles of latitude, for example, are compressed closer and closer together the nearer you get to either north or south pole and what you finish up with is a map something like Fig. When the paper is unfurled you can see that the characteristics of the equator will be shown quite accurately but everything else will be 'wrong’. So if you insist on having the world in this form you must decide what kind of distortion is the most acceptable - or least unacceptable.Ī simple representation of the earth can be produced by wrapping a sheet of paper round a globe model of the earth and transferring the detail horizontally onto the resulting cylinder ( Fig. But a globe is only of limited use: you can’t fold it, put it on a wall or print it in a book.Ī sheet of paper is altogether more handy but it’s not possible to show the earth’s features on a flat surface without causing distortion. This makes it easy enough to represent on a schoolroom globe. The cause of all the argument is that the earth is inconveniently round. Despairing of traditional-minded map-makers coming up with anything better he decided to do the job himself While he was writing his own history of the world, Peters was surprised to discover that there was no map of the world that he considered fair or even scientific - and came to the conclusion that cartographers had produced a ‘faulty school of thought based on false premises’. It is the ‘Eurocentric’ character of most previous maps to which German historian Arno Peters most objects - a distortion produced and reinforced, he says, by ‘four centuries of European world domination’. Most of us assume that this is what all maps do anyway - so we may be surprised to learn that Europe, which on the traditional ‘Mercator projection’ looks larger than South America, is in reality only half its size. Its most attractive aspect is that it presents all countries according to their true surface areas. Arno Peter’s new projection of the world was first published back in 1974 and since then has produced its share of both controversy and converts.
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