3 ms·
> Until the middle of the 20th Century, cartography was more an art than a science. Strange perspective, accurate nautical charts were critical infrastructure
by oersted 2y ago
> Until the middle of the 20th Century, cartography was more an art than a science.
Strange perspective, accurate nautical charts were critical infrastructure in the age of sail, making them and using them was a very technical endeavor backed by significant financing. The brightest scientists of the period spent a lot energy on the longitude problem and similar navigation bottlenecks. Accurate land maps were also important for military and state finance purposes. Much of early mathematics and astronomy were focused on measuring the Earth and pinpointing your location.
I’m not sure if map-making was a science explicitly, there was no UX academia like there is now, but it was certainly a serious engineering field rather than an “art”, and dismissing that rich history of know-how seems like a poor foundation for a review of map-making theory.
- godelski 2y agoI'm guessing the authors here are referring to the fact that many places were really poorly drawn. There was high detail in regions where the map makers were local to but this got fuzzy real fast. Some would even do things like plant fake cities on their map as a means of fraud detection. A secret signature if you will. Someone who copied their map was likely to copy the fake place. You're definitely right that this has a lot to do with early mathematics but remember that that is a small part of map making. How do you define coast lines? Rivers? Borders? The devil is in the details. With older maps the general shapes would be (usually) accurate but it could get fuzzy around the edges. Literally. It's not like they could get a picture from space, or even from the sky. It would take years to measure many things that would take us minutes now
- gsf_emergency 2y agoThose of us who hunt for connections between cartography & cryptography are sometimes confronted with direct identifications of the 2: https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2025/02/24/money-is-the-map.html https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2025/02/24/money... (Only half-serious; dont dvote me!)
- jandrewrogers 2y agoCartography is strongly opinionated. The dirty secret, which I don’t think most people realize, is that there is no correct, reproducible source upon which to base the creation of a map. Every frame of reference is known to be wrong in material ways, so maps are a bit of a polite fiction that work well if you don’t look at them too closely. Maps are more suggestions than truth even in the best of cases. Maps are still useful but as the old saying goes, maps are not the territory. Physics puts a practical bound on how closely a map can represent the territory that in modern contexts turns out to be important.