Today is National Reading a Roadmap Day. 10 facts about maps:
The study of maps and mapmaking is known as cartography, and a person who makes maps is known as a cartographer.
People started making maps at least 16,500 years ago. We know this because there is a map of stars in the French caves of Lascaux. The first road map is believed to be one called the Turn Papyrus Map. It was created in Egypt in around 1160 BC, showing ways to get around bends in rivers.
There is no such thing as a perfectly accurate map of the world. This is because the Earth is a sphere and maps are flat, so any representation will be distorted to some extent. The one we are most familiar with is called the Mercator projection, which was invented in the mid 16th century by a cartographer called Gerardus Mercator. It’s most useful for sailors as it shows exactly where you’d end up if you set sail from any coastline, but many of the land masses are completely the wrong size. North America and Europe look much bigger than they actually are. Greenland and Africa are shown as pretty much the same size when Africa is actually about 14 times bigger. Someone needs to explain this to Donald Trump: there’s 14 times less oil and minerals there than he thinks!
Another projection is the Dymaxion, or Fuller, map, which was created by Buckminster Fuller around 1943. He put a world map on an icosahedron, or 20-sided polygon, and flattened it.
Maps also frequently show places that don’t exist. Sometimes this is down to a mistake. In 1798, James Rennell drew the first map of Africa which wrongly included a mountain range called the Mountains of Kong which didn’t exist, but the mountain range appeared on maps of Africa for over 100 years. Many ancient cartographers believed the fictional city of El Dorado was real for centuries, and included it on maps as recently as 1808.
Sometimes fictitious places were included on purpose, so map makers would know if someone else had simply copied their map instead of putting the work in. The London A to Z had a fictitious street. Another example was created by Otto G. Lindberg and Ernest Alpers who used an anagram of their initials to name a fake town called Agloe, which they placed near the Catskill Mountains in New York as a trap. You can almost see these two rubbing their hands together and the dollar signs lighting up in their eyes when Rand McNally put Agloe on one of their maps. However, Rand McNally had the last laugh because someone, seeing the town on the original map, had built a general store there, and a real community had sprung up around it. Agloe had become a real town. In the modern age, even Google maps adds fake places. Argleton, England was discovered on Google Maps in 2008, but was later removed from Google Maps.
Also, places that do exist are sometimes left off on purpose – like military bases, in case the map ends up in enemy hands. American geological survey maps don’t include nuclear waste dumps, either.
Maps usually show north at the top, which could lead to the assumption that early explorers saw the northern hemisphere as more important or it was reflecting the position of the North Pole on the top of the planet. However, it might actually have been a convention that started in Korea with the Kangnido map, created in 1402 by a Korean astronomer named Kwon Kun. It’s believed he put North at the top because looking North was associated with looking at the emperor. European maps in the middle ages often put east at the top as it suited them back then to “orient” the map looking east (towards the Orient) to make sure they had it the right way up. Orient comes from the Latin word for East, ”oriens” and it evolved into the modern word orientation.
In 1891, a group of countries created the International Map of the World Initiative with the purpose of creating a worldwide standard for maps. Wars and depressions kept scuppering it, although it was still a thing up until the 1980s, but has since dropped off the radar.
During WWII, maps were smuggled into prisoner of war camps to help prisoners escape. There were Monopoly sets with silk maps concealed inside the playing board along with other helpful items like real money hidden in the piles of Monopoly money, and a playing piece which was a working Compass. There were also multi-layered Playing cards which, when soaked in Water, revealed a map.
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