Pre-Digital Cartography Is Still Key To 'Mapping' Human History

In this age of all things digital, it’s heartening to see that some aspects of human history are still best accessed via old fashioned cartography. That is, through what most of us would call maps --- bound in atlases or hanging on someone’s office wall --- encompassing everything from Mercator projections on classroom rollers to Apollo-era star charts torn from NASA notebooks.

An eclectic new compilation of 300 maps --- chronicling 5,000 years of human history, culture and technology in a way that cuts across almost all disciplines --- is an innovative case in point.

Map: Exploring The World, (Phaidon, 2015) is refreshingly non-digital in both its heft and subject matter. Much of the tome details rarely-seen reproductions of maps from much simpler, lower-tech eras. Although the book includes more than a few nods to our cartographic future, its maps mostly remind us of our instinctual fixation on knowing our physical whereabouts.

“We want to be grounded in a place with which we are familiar,” John Hessler, curator of the world’s largest map collection at the Library of Congress and a consulting editor and contributor for the book, told me. “Maps give us the illusion that nothing is changing, and that all the paths we want to travel are clearly marked. At least that is how it used to be.”

Put together by Phaidon's editors, with help from an international panel of curators, academics, collectors and contributors, the book successfully juxtaposes sets of maps in a provocative manner, replete with substantial descriptions and contextual captions.

On the downside, there’s not always a lot to tie the disparate maps together, which can sometimes leave the reader feeling adrift. But “Map” does present humanity’s quest for a sense of place in a way that invites even a casual reader to savor its pages over a rain-soaked afternoon. And some of its entries date back centuries; giving insight into both the long history of technological evolution as well as our global culture.

A few of my personal favorites include:

--- A map engraving of Lewis and Clark’s route to the Pacific Coast based on William Clark’s master chart from the Corps of Discovery’s 1804-1805 expedition. Even though Lewis and Clark didn’t find a commercially navigable overland route to the Pacific Coast; their expedition paved the way for the great American migration to the far West.

--- A quadrant from the first detailed lunar surface map of the 19th century --- the Mappa Selenographica, dating from 1834. The completed map – published some four years later in Der Mond (The Moon) --- was achieved, in part, via painstaking observations using only a 3.75-inch refracting telescope in a Berlin Observatory. There, as the book points out, Johann Heinrich von Mädler spent 600 nights “accurately mapping previously unknown craters, mountains and other surface features.”

--- The instantly recognizable 1977 map of the world’s ocean floors. This map helped the general public understand that our seafloors were hardly static, but spreading along mid-ocean ridges. This, in turn, gave further credence to the theory that Earth’s crust was made up of giant plates that were constantly in motion; eg., the theory of Plate Tectonics.

--- The Dunhuang star atlas, found in a sealed Gobi Desert cave, dates from roughly 700 A.D. but accurately documents more than 1,300 stars and 257 constellations. The editors’ juxtaposition of this ancient Chinese star chart with a contemporary star chart flown on NASA’s Apollo 11 mission to the Moon reveals uncanny stylistic similarities.

The Apollo 11 astronauts, as the book points out, used the star chart to triangulate their “desired trajectory” to and from the lunar surface by manually entering their calculations via “numeric keypad” directly into the “Apollo Guidance Computer.” This saved on limited onboard computing capacity at the time.

--- Retired computer expert Larry McNish’s 2014 “Rectangular Declination vs. Right Ascension Mega Star Chart” is, in fact, a digital image and plots 119,616 of the sky’s brightest stars.

“I look at the [McNish] chart as more of a battle which one man has decided to wage with infinity,” said Hessler. “That chart is enough to give you [a] feeling for the vastness of space and for how difficult it is to comprehend.”

The battle that Hessler describes is one that began when the earliest map-makers tried to convert a three-dimensional concept onto a two-dimensional piece of papyrus.

As Hessler writes in the book’s introduction, cartography is “part science, part artistic design, the map as a concept is complex and ever-changing.”

And although almost anyone with a computer can generate maps in 3-D, the intangibles of quantifying our cosmos still stretch our cartographic limits.

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