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By Root 930 0

between maps and the territories they describe, and affectionate send-ups of map buffs and their love of endless detail. Consider how little the maps these men knew had changed over the centuries: a map in 1870 or 1970 looked more or less like a map in 1570. It was a piece of paper with dark lines standing for coastlines, pastel borders for political divisions, and labeled dots for cities. North was probably up; a grid of thin lines probably represented latitude and longitude. Except for the sad dearth of mermaids or cannibals engraved in the corners, little had changed in five hundred years.

But we live in a strange, shifting time for maps. The sudden onslaught of digital cartography and location-based technologies has changed, for the first time in centuries, our fundamental idea of what a map looks like. Twentieth-century map buffs absorbed in an atlas may have envisioned the page as a window into another world, but today’s maps literally act like windows, not pictures: we peer into them. We can scroll them and rotate and zoom them. We can switch them from road maps to terrain maps and back again or overlay them onto jewel-like, cloudless photographs of our planet from space. Perhaps they even move when we do or show us nearby friends traipsing across them in real time, a children’s fantasy idea when it appeared in a Harry Potter book just a decade ago but now a commonplace reality. It will take a generational shift to complete this definitional shift—after all, my Pictionary doodle of the word “telephone” still has a twisty receiver cord and maybe even a rotary dial, to the bewilderment of my cell phone–drawing children—but the change is well under way. For better or for worse, maps aren’t what they used to be.

And Carroll and Borges would be flabbergasted to see that the biggest game changer has been an actual implementation of their impossible life-sized map. Geobrowser globes like NASA’s World Wind and Microsoft’s Bing Maps platform may be virtual, not life-sized, but their aim is the same as “Mein Herr’s”: to represent an entire territory—the whole world, in fact—in exhaustive one-to-one detail, without any of the selective simplification of paper maps. In many ways, these globes now contain more data than you could glean from the actual world with just a measuring stick or a camera. (Even the paradox-loving Lewis Carroll never proposed a map twice as exhaustive as the territory it depicted!)

Google Earth wasn’t the first virtual globe, but it’s certainly the industry leader now, with more than 700 million installations worldwide. It’s so ubiquitous that it’s hard to believe that the technology began life as a lowly video-game demo. In 1996, some Silicon Graphics engineers were looking for a way to show off the new texture-rendering abilities of their company’s quarter-million-dollar workstations. Inspired by the famous 1968 short film Powers of Ten, which depicts the Earth at scales from the galactic to the microscopic, they produced “Space-to-Your-Face,” a flyover demo in which the viewer zoomed down from a high Earth orbit to find a Nintendo 64 sitting on a pedestal atop the Matterhorn, with an SGI graphics chip inside. Three years later, Chris Tanner showed the video to Brian McClendon; both were part of a group of engineers who had left SGI to found their own game technology start-up, called Intrinsic Graphics. “The day I saw it,” remembers McClendon, now vice president of engineering for Google Geo, “I said, ‘We should start a separate company to do this.’ The problem was, we weren’t funded yet for the first company!”

As soon as Intrinsic had funding for its game library, the founders did spin off a new company, called Keyhole, to focus on geographic applications of their 3-D technology. The post-Internet-bubble period was a terrible time to found a start-up, so Keyhole told potential investors it was working on a tool for the real estate and travel industries, a way to let clients preview a property before renting. In reality, though, the Keyhole team knew what was compelling about its new product, and