Flattening the Earth Two Thousand Years of Map Projections

About this book

As long as there have been maps, cartographers have grappled with the impossibility of portraying the earth in two dimensions. To solve this problem mapmakers have created hundreds of map projections, mathematical methods for drawing the round earth on a flat surface. Yet of the hundreds of existing projections, and the infinite number that are theoretically possible, none is perfectly accurate.

Flattening the Earth is the first detailed history of map projections since 1863. John P. Snyder discusses and illustrates the hundreds of known projections created from 500 B.C. to the present, emphasizing developments since the Renaissance and closing with a look at the variety of projections made possible by computers.

Flattening the Earth contains 170 illustrations, including outline maps from original sources and modern computerized reconstructions. Though the text is not mathematically based, a few equations are included to permit the more technical reader to plot some projections. Tables summarize the features of nearly two hundred different projections and list those used in nineteenth-and twentieth-century atlases.
 

Contents

List of Illustrations
Preface

1: Emergence of Map Projections: Classical Through Renaissance
- The Classical and Medieval Legacy: Map Projections Developed before the Renaissance The Equirectangular Projection
- The Trapezoidal Projection
- Ptolemy’s Three Projections
- Globular Projections
- The Earliest Azimuthal Projections
- New Projections of the Renaissance
- New Conic Projections
- Oval Projections
- Globelike Projections
- Mercator’s Projection for Navigators
- The Sinusoidal Projection

2: Map Projections in an Age of Mathematical Enlightenment, 1670-1799
- Eighteenth-Century Use of Earlier Map Projections
- The Equirectangular Projection
- The Trapezoidal Projection
- The Azimuthal Projections
- The Mercator Projection
- The Sinusoidal Projection
- The "Bonne" Projection
- The New Projections
- Map Projections as an Emerging Mathematical Science
- Perspective Projections with Low Error
- Some Modified Globular Projections
- The Improved Simple or Equidistant Conic Projection
- Murdoch’s and Euler’s Approaches to the Equidistant Conic Projection
- Colles’s Perspective Conic Projection
- Cassini and His Transverse Equidistant Cylindrical Projection
- Lambert’s Cornucopia of Important Projections

3: Map Projections of the Nineteenth Century
- Nineteenth-Century Use of Earlier Projections
- Cylindrical and Rectilinear Projections
- Azimuthal Projections
- Conic and Sinusoidal Projections
- The Globular Projection
- The New Projections of the Nineteenth Century
- New Cylindrical Projections
- New Pseudocylindrical Projections
- New Conic Projections
- New Azimuthal Projections
- Modified Azimuthal Projections
- Globular Modifications
- Conformal Innovations
- Star Projections
- Conformal Projections without Singular Points
- Polyhedric and Polyhedral Projections
- Tissot’s Optimal Projection
- Fiorini’s Projections
- The Jervis Cycloidal Projection
- Projections to Promote Commerce
- General Treatises and Journals
- The Tissot Indicatrix

4: Map Projections of the Twentieth Century
- Twentieth-Century Use of Earlier Projections
- Cylindrical Projections
- Pseudocylindrical Projections: The Sinusoidal and Mollweide
- Azimuthal Projections
- Conic Projections
- Other Earlier Projections
- New Twentieth-Century Projections
- Cylindrical Projections
- New Pseudocylindrical Projections
- New Azimuthal Projections
- New Modified Azimuthal Projections
- New Pseudoazimuthal Projections
- Modifications of the Stereographic Projection
- New Conic Projections
- Pseudoconic Projections
- Other Projections

General Works and Journals
Notes
References and Bibliography
Index

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