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By Root 860 0

finally replaced large-scale trigonometric surveys as the state of the mapmaking art. It’s much older than Google Earth, though—during the Peninsular Campaign of the Civil War, General George McClellan ordered some of his officers to ascend five hundred feet in a tethered silk balloon and make maps of the Confederate lines. The new West Point grad who spent the most time in the balloon, in fact, was none other than the young George Armstrong Custer. A century later, the very first U.S. military satellites were equipped with high-resolution cameras for taking aerial photos but had no way to develop the film or transmit its images back to Earth. As a result, the satellites were designed to drop film packets into the atmosphere with parachutes, where they could be retrieved in midair (most of the time, anyway) by a military transport plane.

* Yes, Google actually unveiled a Street View snowmobile when it published these photos during the 2010 Winter Olympics. During my visit to the Googleplex, I met Dan Ratner, who has helped design every vehicle in the Street View fleet. In addition to the cars and snowmobiles, there’s also a “trike,” which Ratner dreamed up during a visit to Barcelona when he noticed that many of the cobblestoned streets were too narrow for the regular Google cars. The trike has since been used to map national parks and theme parks, but whenever it rolls out, bystanders unaccountably mistake it for an ice cream vendor. Kids in Legoland asked the driver for ice cream, but so did a famous Nobel laureate once at a technology conference. Ratner also showed me the newest member of the Street View family: a trolley capable of capturing indoor imagery. Nobody would tell me where exactly the trolley will be filming. The Louvre? The Taj Mahal? The Playboy Mansion? It was top secret.

* Which is why the element was named for the Greek sun god, Helios.

† One odd curio that isn’t trotted out much in the Google press materials is the so-called forest swastika discovered in the 1990s in aerial photographs of northeastern Germany. During the 1930s heyday of the Third Reich, Nazi officials apparently planted a swastika of larch trees in a Brandenburg pine forest. The effect was invisible except during a few weeks each spring and autumn, when the paler larch leaves branded a bright yellow swastika across the treetops. The offending trees were cut down after German tabloids ran photos of the swastika in 2000.

* Rhumb lines are also called “loxodromes,” which always sounds to me more like the name of some iffy pharmaceutical. “Ask your doctor if Loxodrome is right for you!”

† Even Mercator knew that his projection screwed up the poles. His very first map of the kind left off the Arctic entirely, displaying it as a special little polar inset, the way we do Alaska and Hawaii.

* The only way to see all of a round globe from the same vantage point with no distortion is to visit the Mapparium, a wonderful Boston oddity built by the Christian Science Church in 1935. The Mapparium is a thirty-foot-tall globe of stained glass that visitors stand inside (passing through on an equatorial bridge), their eyes at the same distance from every point on Earth at once. Because of the difficulty of replacing the globe’s 608 glass panels, the map is frozen in the year of its completion, still displaying long-gone places like Bechuanaland, Trucial Oman, and the Netherlands Indies to curious tourists.

† Peters’s commitment to social justice started early; his father, Bruno, had been imprisoned by the Nazis in 1945 for labor union activism and would have been executed had the war not ended shortly thereafter.

* For a very good reason: to preserve right angles in close-up. The earliest version of Google Maps used a better projection, but as a result, streets in high-latitude Scandinavian cities met at wonky angles.

† One counterexample is the West Lancashire town of Argleton, which appears on Google Maps and Google Earth but, sadly, not in real life. Google officially blamed the anomaly on “occasional errors