Re: Question

From: Martyn Harrison (nospam_at_spammers.of.the.world.unite)
Date: 07/14/04 

Date: Wed, 14 Jul 2004 21:57:57 GMT

http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/cases/sa/SAIRC/1997/50.html

Apparently on date Wed, 14 Jul 2004 08:34:57 GMT, "David B"
<tronospamchos@tesco.net> said:

>George wrote in message <9b937279.0407131655.673d380@posting.google.com>...
>>
>>[A link to Mercator's 1569 World map would be nice here, but I
>>couldn't find one on the web.]
>
>You mean you haven't checked the Primesauce site recently?
>http://www.trochos.plus.com/primesauce/later.htm#84

On this subject, I'm under the impression that in 1500, Europeans had access to
fairly sophisticated geometric understanding and that a number of ways of
representing a curved geography on a flat map would have been possible,
available for discussion, and some level of choosing a preferred projection
could have been achieved.

This assumes they understood the earth to be rotund, maps flat, and so forth,
plus some were intelligent enough to realise how the various projections worked
in practice.

What I'm getting at is the question of whether Mercator projection was actually
a new idea as such, or just an existing idea popularised via that name. I
reckon the conical projection does have some real advantages in estimating
distance within a northern hemisphere ocean voyage such as an Atlantic
crossing. In that sense, I'm wondering whether Mercator was something nobody
had thought of (I find this rather unlikely, although obviously it may be the
way of it), or whether it was adopted for some reason (and what reasons those
might be.)

The obvious thing is it reflects an entire globe moderately well and is
extremely easy to map lat and long into a rectangular space.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Question
    ... >What I'm getting at is the question of whether Mercator projection was actually ... or whether it was adopted for some reason (and what reasons those ... >extremely easy to map lat and long into a rectangular space. ...
    (sci.archaeology)
  • Re: Lisp geographic software
    ... The Mercator projection is rather simple, ... bunch of identical maps to paperfeed a pen plotter. ... routine gave me plotter coordinates to map references, ...
    (comp.lang.lisp)
  • Re: Alaska on Ancient maps
    ... if you think that Dee outweight Professors of Carthography then you are out ... only that Carthography isn't at all like working with old documents. ... Normal projection ... in other word if the mid-point on the map is in focus I refer to the upper ...
    (sci.archaeology)
  • Re: OT: Map projections
    ... I want to take these pictures and map them onto a 3d sphere, ... Which projection lends itself most easily for this (mercator, peters, ... planets from fractal generated terrain. ...
    (talk.origins)
  • Re: Alaska on Ancient maps
    ... Inger E Johansson wrote: ... > only that Carthography isn't at all like working with old documents. ... > in other word if the mid-point on the map is in focus I refer to the upper ... > * Transversell projection. ...
    (sci.archaeology)