Re: Question

From: Eric Stevens (eric.stevens_at_sum.co.nz)
Date: 07/16/04 

Date: Fri, 16 Jul 2004 13:51:10 +1200

On Wed, 14 Jul 2004 21:57:57 GMT, Martyn Harrison
<nospam@spammers.of.the.world.unite> wrote:

>
>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.
>
>
The important thing to Mercator was that on his projection a Rhumb
line could be projected as straight. The Mercator projection is the
only one which allows this.

Eric Stevens

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