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From Ptolemy to GPS, the Brief History of

Maps
By Clive Thompson, Smithsonian Magazine on 08.28.17
Word Count 2,399
Level MAX

Martin Waldseemüller's world map, including inset maps of Ptolemy's Old World and Amerigo Vespucci's account of the New
World, 1507. Image by: University of Minnesota via Wikimedia.

Last spring, a 23-year-old woman was driving her car through the Ontario town of Tobermory.
It was unfamiliar territory for her, so she was dutifully following her GPS. Indeed, she was so
intent on following the device that she didn’t notice that her car was headed straight for
Georgian Bay, so she drove down a boat launch and straight into the frigid water. She
thankfully managed to climb out and swim to shore as her bright red Yaris sank beneath the
waves.

Accidents like this have become weirdly common. In Manhattan, one man followed his GPS
into a park, where his car got stuck on a staircase. And in Europe, a 67-year-old Belgian
woman was led remarkably astray by her GPS, turning what was supposed to be a 90-mile
drive to Brussels into a daylong voyage into Germany and beyond. Amazingly, she just
patiently followed the computer’s instructions instead of relying on her own common sense,
until she noticed the street signs were in Croatian.

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You can laugh, but many of us have stopped paying attention to the world around us because
we are too intent on following directions. Some observers worry that this represents a new and
dangerous shift in our style of navigation. Scientists since the 1940s have argued we normally
possess an internal compass, “a map-like representation within the ‘black box’ of the nervous
system,” as geographer Rob Kitchin puts it. It’s how we know where we are in our
neighborhoods, our cities, the world.

Is it possible that today’s global positioning systems and smartphones are affecting our basic
ability to navigate? Will technology alter forever how we get around?

Most certainly, because it already has. Three thousand years ago, our ancestors began a long
experiment in figuring out how they fit into the world by inventing a bold new tool: the map.

One of the oldest surviving maps is, ironically, about the size and shape of an early iPhone:
the Babylonian Map of the World. A clay tablet created around 500 to 700 B.C. in
Mesopotamia, it depicts a circular Babylon at the center, bisected by the Euphrates River and
surrounded by the ocean. It doesn’t have much detail — a few regions are named, including
Assyria — but it wasn’t really for navigation. It was more primordial: to help the map-holder
grasp the idea of the whole world, with himself at the center.

“There was something almost talismanic, I think, about having the world in your hand,” says
Jerry Brotton, a professor of Renaissance studies at Queen Mary University of London who
specializes in cartography. Indeed, accuracy wasn’t a great concern of early map-drawers.
Maps were more a form of artistic expression, or a way of declaring one’s fiefdom. Centuries
later, the Romans drew an extensive map of their empire on a long scroll, but since the map
was barely a foot high and dozens of feet wide, it couldn’t be realistic. It was more of a
statement, an attempt to make Rome’s sprawl feel cohesive.

The first great attempt to make mapping realistic came in the second century A.D. with
Claudius Ptolemy. He was an astronomer and astrologer obsessed with making accurate
horoscopes, which required precisely placing someone’s birth town on a world map. “He
invented geography, but it was just because he wanted to do better horoscopes,” notes
Matthew Edney, a professor of cartography at the University of Southern Maine.

Ptolemy gathered documents detailing the locations of towns, and he augmented that
information with the tales of travelers. By the time he was done, he had devised a system of
lines of latitude and longitude and plotted some 10,000 locations — from Britain to Europe,
Asia and North Africa. Ptolemy even invented ways to flatten the planet (like most Greeks and
Romans, he knew the Earth was round) onto a two-dimensional map. What did he call his new
technique? “Geography.”

After the Roman Empire fell, Ptolemy’s realistic geography was lost to the West for almost a
thousand years. Once again, maps were concerned more with storytelling: a famous 12th-
century map made by the Islamic scholar al-Sharif al-Idrisi — commissioned by his protector
and patron, King Roger II of Sicily, a Christian — neatly blended Islamic and Christian cities
together, while centering the world on (of course) Roger’s landholdings.

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Other Christian maps cared even less about accuracy: they were mappaemundi, designed to
show how the story of Christ penetrated the world. The most famous of these was made in
Hereford, England, a massive 5- by 4-foot creation drawn on a single animal skin. Almost
none of Europe, Asia or North Africa is recognizable, and strange wonders run amok: a lynx
struts across Asia Minor (“it sees through walls and urinates a black stone,” the mapmakers
note); Noah’s Ark is perched up in Armenia; Africa is populated by people with eyes and
mouths in their shoulders.

At the top of the map — which faced east, the holiest direction — were pictures showing
Adam and Eve tossed out of Eden and Christ returning on the Day of Judgment. The map
wasn’t intended to get you from town to town, it was designed to guide you to heaven.

As the Renaissance dawned, maps began to improve; commerce demanded it. Ships were
crossing oceans and kings engaged in empire-building needed to chart their lands.
Technology drove maps to greater accuracy: the advent of reliable compasses helped create
“portolan” maps, which had lines crisscrossing the sea from port to port, helping guide sailors.
Ptolemy’s ancient work was rediscovered, and new maps were drawn based on his thousand-
year-old calculations.

Indeed, Christopher Columbus’ voyage to America was partly due to Ptolemy — and errors in
his cartography. Columbus carried a map influenced by the ancient Roman's work. But
Ptolemy thought the world was 30-percent smaller than it actually was. Worse, the mapmaker
was using Arabian miles, which were longer than Italian ones. Together, these mistakes led
Columbus to believe the voyage to Asia would be much shorter. It was an early example of a
GPS-like near disaster.

As sea trade increased, maps of the New World became better, at least the seacoasts and
major rivers, places the beaver trade depended on. The inland of America was mostly a
mystery; mapmakers often draw it as a big blank space labeled “terra incognita.”

“The coastlines were accurate, but they weren’t as concerned about the interiors,” notes John
Rennie Short, a professor and cartography expert at the University of Maryland Baltimore
County. “The rest is, like, who knows? As long as you keep bringing the beavers, we don’t
care.”

Sea voyages became easier after 1569, when Gerardus Mercator unveiled the single greatest
innovation in mapping after Ptolemy: the Mercator Projection. A polymath who was equally
skilled in engraving and mathematics, Mercator figured out the best trick yet to represent the
surface of a globe on a map: by gradually widening the landmasses and oceans the farther
north and south they appear on the map. This was a great aid to navigation, but it also subtly
distorted how we see the world. Countries close to the poles, like Canada and Russia, were
artificially enlarged, while regions at the equator, like Africa, shrank.

This was becoming the cardinal rule of maps: “No map entirely tells the truth,” notes Mark
Monmonier, author of How to Lie With Maps. “There’s always some distortion, some point of
view.”

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Indeed, everyday people were realizing that a map was an act of persuasion, a visual rhetoric.
In 1553, a gentry in Surrey, England, drew a map of the town’s central fields to prove these
were common lands and that villagers thus should be allowed to graze animals there. The
map, they wrote, would allow for “the more playne manifest and direct understondying” of the
situation. Maps, says Rose Mitchell, a map archivist at the National Archives of the U.K., were
“used to settle arguments.” Meanwhile, educated people began collecting maps and
displaying them “to show off how knowledgeable they were,” she adds. Even if you couldn’t
read the words on a map from a foreign country, you could generally understand it, and even
navigate by it. The persuasive power of a map was its glanceability. It was data made visual.

Maps weren’t just symbols of power, they conferred power. With a good map, a military had
an advantage in battle, a king knew how much land could be taxed. Western maps showing
Africa’s interior as empty — the mapmakers had little to go on — gave empires dreamy
visions of claiming Africa for themselves. All that empty space seemed, to them, ripe for the
taking. Maps helped propel the depredations of colonialism, as Simon Garfield argues in On
the Map.

The United States after Lewis and Clark showed Americans just how much West there was to
be won. Mind you, their trip was hellish; previous maps were so vague they showed the
Rockies as a single mountain range. “So they thought they were just going to cruise up to it,
go over the top, and pop their canoes back in the river and go all the way to Pacific,” laughs
David Rumsey, who created Stanford’s map collection in his name. “And it was a bloody
nightmare, up and down, up and down.”

Maps were so valuable that seafarers plundered them. When the 17th-century buccaneer
Bartholomew Sharp captured a Spanish ship, he exulted over his cartographic haul: “In this
prize I took a Spanish manuscript of prodigious value,” he later wrote. “It describes all the
ports, harbors, bayes, Sands, rock & rising of the land....They were going to throw it over
board but by good luck I saved it. The Spanish cried when I gott the book.”

By the late 19th century, the surge in mathematic reasoning and measurement technology
made mapmaking explode. In France, the Cassini family crisscrossed the country to calculate
its dimensions with precision never before seen. Their trick? Using “triangulation” — a bit of
trigonometry — to let them stitch together thousands of measurements taken by peering
through the new, high-tech “theodolite.” Breakthroughs in binocular lenses allowed surveyors
to measure scores of miles at a glance. World maps became increasingly accurate.

Local mapping became deeply granular. The British Ordnance Survey began mapping the
U.K. down to the square yard, and the German entrepreneur Karl Baedeker produced similarly
nuanced maps of European cities. Tourists could now confidently tour foreign realms, their
annually updated guides in hand, able to locate individual buildings, much like today’s citizens
peering at Google Maps on their phones. Being prominent on a local map was valuable to
merchants, so mapmakers in the U.S. sold the rights. “If you paid more, you’d get your
building cited,” Short notes. “It was like advertising.”

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Maps could change the way people understood the world around them. In the 1880s, the
social reformer Charles Booth produced a moral map of London, with houses color-coded by
income and—in Booth’s shaky calculations—criminal tendencies. (Areas colored yellow were
“wealthy,” while black ones were “Lowest class. Vicious, semi-criminal.”) Booth wanted to
help aid the poor by showing geography was tied to destiny, but his techniques wound up
reinforcing it. In the U.S., banks began to “redline” poor neighborhoods, refusing to loan
money to anyone in their precincts.

By the 20th century, maps helped win the Second World War. Winston Churchill fought with
guidance from his “map room,” an underground chamber where up to 40 military staffers
would shove colored pins into the map-bedecked walls; Churchill adorned his bedroom wall
with a huge map showing Britain’s coast, constantly visualizing in his mind how to defend it
against invasion.

These days, our maps seem alive. They speak, in robotic voices, telling us precisely where to
go, guided by the satellites and mapping of companies like Waze, Google, Bing and
Mapquest. “There’s something fun about turn-by-turn directions,” says Greg Milner, author of
Pinpoint: How GPS Is Changing Technology, Culture and Our Minds. “It’s very seductive.”
There’s no need even to orient yourself to north: the robot voice tells you to turn right, turn left,
with you always at the center.

Milner worries, though, that GPS is weakening something fundamental in ourselves, corroding
not just our orientation skills, but how well we remember the details of the world around us. A
2008 study in Japan found that people who used a GPS to navigate a city developed a shakier
grasp of the terrain than those who consulted a paper map or those who learned the route via
direct experience. Similarly, a 2008 Cornell study found that “GPS eliminates much of the
need to pay attention.” Some map historians agree that a subtle change is at hand. Short tells
me that he likes the convenience of GPS-brokered directions, “but what I do lose is the sense
of how things hang together.”

Rumsey isn’t convinced of this loss, though. As he argues, the convenience of GPS and online
mapping means we live in an increasingly cartographic age. Many online searches produce a
map as part of the search results—for a local store, a vacation spot, live traffic updates before
heading home. People today see far more maps in a single day than they used to, Rumsey
notes. “The more you interact with maps, the more agile you become. Maps beget more
maps.” When Rumsey first started collecting and displaying maps in the 1970s, people said,
why bother? These are old and out of date; who cares? Now when people visit his collection at
Stanford, they “get it right away. That’s because they’ve been exposed.”

It’s possible both effects are true. When I decide to order some takeout, my phone will, like a
robot Baedeker, generate a map of local places that are open. It’s true that if I walked to one,
I’d just numbly be following zigzagging turn-by-turn directions. But on the other hand, I look at
that little gustatorial mappamundi of my neighborhood pretty often; I could probably draw it
from memory by now.

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Technology hasn’t changed some of our oldest urges. The historian Brotton once visited
Google, where the engineers showed him a huge, wall-sized version of Google Earth. They
asked him whenever a visitor shows up to try it out, what’s the first thing they zoom in to look
for? Their own home.

“They go, wow, look at that!” Brotton says. It’s the same perspective as the people who held
that Babylonian clay tablet nearly three millennia ago: using a map to figure out where, exactly,
we stand.

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Quiz

1 Which of the following ideas did the author develop LEAST in this article about the history of
maps?

(A) the differing purposes of early mapmakers

(B) the intellectual and political power of maps

(C) the utility of mapmaking in supporting poor neighborhoods

(D) the effects of inconsistencies on early maps

2 Which answer choice accurately explains how maps changed over time?

(A) At first, maps were used for demonstrating the wealth and power of different
civilizations. Then, they developed into a specialized technology that helped
guide sailors. Finally, they have become a way for intellectuals to display their
knowledge of the world.

(B) At first, maps were used by religious groups to provide a guide for reaching
heaven. Then, they developed into a way for colonists to accurately map and
record the interiors of the lands they settled. Finally, maps have become a
simple way to help people navigate.

(C) At first, maps were used to create horoscopes that would tell people their
futures. Then, they developed into a way for empires to illustrate their size and
power for all to see. Finally, maps have become an accurate representation of
the size of the physical landscape.

(D) At first, maps were used as symbolic illustrations of people's place in the world.
Then, they developed into a way for leaders and explorers to plan their
conquest of the world. Finally, maps have become ubiquitous technology that
puts individuals at their center.

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3 Read the selection from the article.

Local mapping became deeply granular. The British Ordnance Survey


began mapping the U.K. down to the square yard, and the German
entrepreneur Karl Baedeker produced similarly nuanced maps of
European cities. Tourists could now confidently tour foreign realms,
their annually updated guides in hand, able to locate individual
buildings, much like today’s citizens peering at Google Maps on their
phones.

Which of the following words and phrases from the selection BEST emphasize what the author
means by "granular"?

(A) square yard; nuanced

(B) began mapping; confidently

(C) foreign realms; annually

(D) updated guides; locate

4 Read the sentence from the article.

As he argues, the convenience of GPS and online mapping means we


live in an increasingly cartographic age.

How does the author refine the meaning of "cartographic" over the course of the article?

(A) through descriptions of maps' evolving appearance and purpose

(B) through explanations of maps' desirability for the educated

(C) through the use of technical terms for the process of mapmaking

(D) through the use of data regarding the frequency of GPS errors

This article is available at 5 reading levels at https://newsela.com. 8

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