Maphead_ Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks - Ken Jennings [107]
Mapmakers may make all these choices with the best of intentions, but the result is still, even if unconsciously, to reinforce some particular view of the world. I distinctly remember not believing, when my parents first told me, that Brazil was actually five times the size of Alaska. On the map of my bedroom wall, I could see with my own eyes that they were virtually twins! That’s because my map was drawn according to the venerable Mercator Projection. In 1569, the Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator drew a world map using a cylindrical projection that would neatly render a rhumb line—a ship’s course in a constant direction, like west or north-northeast—as a straight line.* The problem is that this kind of projection inflates the polar regions way out of proportion—in fact, on such a map, the poles can never even be drawn, because they’re an infinite distance from the Equator.† Mercator maps were still used everywhere when I was growing up—classrooms, nightly newscasts, stamps, government briefing rooms—and so my generation grew up thinking that Greenland was bigger than Africa, since Greenland is oversized fourteenfold on Mercator maps.
Of course, all map projections have to fudge somewhere, whether on area or on direction. Imagine trying to flatten an orange peel onto a flat surface, and as it tears and scrunches, you’ll see the problem: something’s got to give.* But the Mercator map stayed so popular in the West for so long, at least in part, because of how helpful its particular distortions were. Most obviously, it makes North America and Europe seem disproportionately important, while marginalizing much of the developing world. As a result, a 1996 study found that when students all over the world were asked to draw the contours of the continents, nearly all made Europe too big and Africa too small. Even when the test was given in Africa, the results were the same. And during the Cold War, we liked the sprawling, menacing Soviet Union that Mercator provided us, with the rest of Asia dangling halfheartedly beneath it.
As a high school junior, I walked into my Spanish class on the first day of school to see, replacing the familiar Mercator map on the teacher’s wall, an equal-area Peters Projection map. This controversial map was unveiled with much fanfare in 1973 by the German historian Arno Peters, who told the media it was a revolutionary attack on the stodgy Mercator.† In fact, it was a simple retread of the 1855 Gall Orthographic Projection, and many cartographers disliked its north-south distortion of the equatorial regions, which stretched shape in order to properly represent area. The geographer Arthur Robinson compared Peters’s continents to “wet, ragged long winter underwear hung out to dry on the Arctic Circle.” But if Peters’s goal was to shock, it worked on me. I stared at the map endlessly, marveling at the big, muscular Africa dominating its center and the anemic Russia and Alaska hugging the North Pole. I’d been told that the maps I knew were lying to me about the globe, but it was quite another thing to see the evidence with my own eyes.
You can trace the decline of the Mercator Projection by looking at the set changes on Saturday Night Live’s “Weekend Update” faux newscast. The world outline map behind the newscasters was an acromegalic Mercator back in the Dan Aykroyd/Jane Curtin era, but under Dennis Miller it was replaced with a less absurd, modified Mercator called