Mercator's World
Author:
Publisher:
Published: 1998
Total Pages: 524
ISBN-13:
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Rhumb Lines and Map Wars
Author: Mark Monmonier
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2010-11-15
Total Pages: 257
ISBN-13: 0226534324
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn Rhumb Lines and Map Wars, Mark Monmonier offers an insightful, richly illustrated account of the controversies surrounding Flemish cartographer Gerard Mercator's legacy. He takes us back to 1569, when Mercator announced a clever method of portraying the earth on a flat surface, creating the first projection to take into account the earth's roundness. As Monmonier shows, mariners benefited most from Mercator's projection, which allowed for easy navigation of the high seas with rhumb lines—clear-cut routes with a constant compass bearing—for true direction. But the projection's popularity among nineteenth-century sailors led to its overuse—often in inappropriate, non-navigational ways—for wall maps, world atlases, and geopolitical propaganda. Because it distorts the proportionate size of countries, the Mercator map was criticized for inflating Europe and North America in a promotion of colonialism. In 1974, German historian Arno Peters proffered his own map, on which countries were ostensibly drawn in true proportion to one another. In the ensuing "map wars" of the 1970s and 1980s, these dueling projections vied for public support—with varying degrees of success. Widely acclaimed for his accessible, intelligent books on maps and mapping, Monmonier here examines the uses and limitations of one of cartography's most significant innovations. With informed skepticism, he offers insightful interpretations of why well-intentioned clerics and development advocates rallied around the Peters projection, which flagrantly distorted the shape of Third World nations; why journalists covering the controversy ignored alternative world maps and other key issues; and how a few postmodern writers defended the Peters worldview with a self-serving overstatement of the power of maps. Rhumb Lines and Map Wars is vintage Monmonier: historically rich, beautifully written, and fully engaged with the issues of our time.
A World of Innovation
Author: Gerhard Holzer
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Published: 2015-02-27
Total Pages: 280
ISBN-13: 1443875708
DOWNLOAD EBOOKGerhard Mercator (1512–1594) was the most important cartographer and globemaker of the 16th century. He is particularly remembered for his publication Atlas sive Cosmographicae Meditationes de Fabrica Mundi et Fabricati Figura (1595), and for his specific cylindrical map projection (1569), which is still used widely today. This book brings together the latest research on Mercator with a view to his sources and his relationships with other scientific disciplines and cartographers of his time, as well as his role in the wider worlds of Renaissance cartography and Humanism.
The World of Gerard Mercator
Author: Andrew Taylor
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Published: 2009-05-26
Total Pages: 308
ISBN-13: 080271806X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe story of discovery and mapmaking is one of pushing back shadows," writes Andrew Taylor, and "none in the last two thousand years achieved as much as Gerard Mercator in extending the boundaries of what could be comprehended." His life encompassed most of the turbulent, extraordinary sixteenth century, a time when revolutions would engulf religion, science, and civilization. Almost extinguished by the Inquisition, Mercator's genius lay in making maps, and his achievement did nothing less than revolutionize the study of geography. Appropriately for an era undergoing radical change, Mercator was full of contradiction, tied to knowledge and beliefs of the past while forging a new path. He never traveled beyond northern Europe, yet he had the imagination to draw the entire world anew and to solve a problem that had baffled sailors and scientists for centuries: how a curved Earth could be faithfully rendered on a flat surface so as to allow for accurate navigation. His "projection" was so visionary that it is used by NASA to map Mars today. Andrew Taylor has beautifully captured Mercator amidst the turmoil and opportunity of his times and the luminaries who inspired his talent-his teacher and business partner, Gemma Frisius; the English magus, John Dee; his benefactor, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, his cartographic collaborator, Abraham Ortelius. The World of Gerard Mercator is a masterful biography of one of the men most responsible for the modern world.
The World of Gerard Mercator
Author: Andrew Taylor
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2004-11
Total Pages: 312
ISBN-13: 9780802713773
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAlmost extinguished by the Spanish Inquisition, genius cartographer Mercator revolutionized the study of geography. His "projection" was so visionary that it is still used by NASA to map Mars today.
Mercator
Author: Nicholas Crane
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2003-01-02
Total Pages: 377
ISBN-13: 0805066241
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Mercator
Author: Nicholas Crane
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
Published: 2014-09-02
Total Pages: 500
ISBN-13: 1466880139
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAn enthralling biography of the man who created the first real map of the world and changed civilization Born at the dawn of the age of discovery, Gerhard Mercator lived in an era of formidable intellectual and scientific advances. At the center of these developments were the cartographers who painstakingly pieced together the evidence to create ever more accurate pictures of the planet. Mercator was the greatest of all of them-a poor farm boy who attended one of Europe's top universities, was persecuted and imprisoned by the Inquisition, but survived to coin the term "atlas" and to produce the so-called projection for which he is known. Devoutly religious, yet gripped by Aristotelian science, Mercator struggled to reconcile the two, a conflict mirrored by the growing clash in Europe between humanism and the Church. Mercator solved the dimensional riddle that had vexed cosmographers for so long: How could the three-dimensional globe be converted into a two-dimensional map while retaining true compass bearings? The projection revolutionized navigation and has become the most common worldview. Nicholas Crane-a fellow geographer-has combined a keen eye for historical detail with a gift for vivid storytelling to produce a masterful biography of the man who mapped the planet.
Atlas of the world
Author: Sjoerd De Meer
Publisher:
Published: 2012
Total Pages: 160
ISBN-13: 9789057308543
DOWNLOAD EBOOKGerard Mercator (1512-1594) was one of the most important cartographers of the 16th century. His 'Atlas of the World' is one of the highlights in the cartographic collection of the Maritime Museum Rotterdam. It was assembled out of three copies of Mercator's famous Map of the World of 1569. In this map Mercator employed a new type of projection, with increasing latitude towards the poles. This so-called 'Mercator projection' marked the beginning of a new era in the evolution of navigation charts and is still widely used today. Today, only three copies of the world map and two fragments in the 'Mercator Atlas of Europe' (collection British Library) have been preserved. But only the copy of the Maritiem Museum Rotterdam has been carefully assembled, probably by Mercator himself in the form of an atlas: the 'Atlas of the World'. It contains remarkably large maps of oceans and continents, and is therefore thought to be a prototype for a sea-atlas that was never taken into production. 0Translation of the Dutch edition (2009), 978-90-5730-611-2.
Flattening the Earth
Author: John P. Snyder
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 1997-12-05
Total Pages: 384
ISBN-13: 0226767477
DOWNLOAD EBOOKCartographers have long grappled with the impossibility of portraying the earth in two dimensions. To solve this problem, mapmakers have created map projections. This work discusses and illustrates the known map projections from before 500BC to the present, with facts on their origins and use.
Map Worlds
Author: Will C. van den Hoonaard
Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press
Published: 2013-09-21
Total Pages: 528
ISBN-13: 1554589347
DOWNLOAD EBOOKMap Worlds plots a journey of discovery through the world of women map-makers from the golden age of cartography in the sixteenth-century Low Countries to tactile maps in contemporary Brazil. Author Will C. van den Hoonaard examines the history of women in the profession, sets out the situation of women in technical fields and cartography-related organizations, and outlines the challenges they face in their careers. Map Worlds explores women as colourists in early times, describes the major houses of cartographic production, and delves into the economic function of intermarriages among cartographic houses and families. It relates how in later centuries, working from the margins, women produced maps to record painful tribal memories or sought to remedy social injustices. Much later, one woman so changed the way we think about continents that the shift has been likened to the Copernican revolution. Other women created order and wonder about the lunar landscape, and still others turned the art and science of making maps inside out, exposing the hidden, unconscious, and subliminal “text” of maps. Shared by all these map-makers are themes of social justice and making maps work for the betterment of humanity.
