Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks (48 page)

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Quick—is Los Angeles east or west of Reno? What’s the first U.S. state you’ll hit if you travel due north from Ecuador, on the west coast of South America? The answers (east and Florida, respectively) may seem counterintuitive if you’ve never seen this particular type of geographic brainteaser before. The underlying misconceptions here are a result of our brain’s inability to remember and manage diagonal relationships. We simplify them in our mental models so that California is due west of Nevada and South America due south of North America, when the actual relationships are much less rectilinear.

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The Dutch-born geographer
Harm de Blij has claimed
that, contrary to what you might expect, Americans actually have a much better innate sense of direction than Europeans do, because Americans have more experience navigating orderly, gridlike cities. Twisty cobblestoned streets apparently don’t sharpen a person’s skills—they just cause people to throw their hands up in the air, shout
“Zut alors!”
or
“Ach du lieber!”
or something, and give up.

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For many years, the uncanny homing abilities of Tunisian desert ants were one of the great navigational mysteries of the animal kingdom. Most ant species find their way home by following the scent trails left by other ants, but that doesn’t work well in the windy, sandy Sahara. A Swiss zoologist named Rüdiger Wehner spent decades trying to crack the secret of the ants’ internal odometers with a series of ingenious experiments. To find out whether ants judge distances based on “optic flow,” the speed with which they observe the landscape passing them by, he blocked their vision with tiny paint “blindfolds.” To find out if they judge distances based on metabolic effort, he fitted each ant with a tiny weighted backpack. Finally, his team decided to alter the ants’ pace length by putting them on tiny stilts made of individual pig bristles. Bingo! The stilt-walking ants drastically overshot their destination, proving to the researchers that ants reckon the distance they’ve traveled by counting their steps in some instinctive fashion. Best of all, the researchers now have an adorable set of ant-sized fashion accessories ready for all occasions.

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You may have read that the Great Wall of China is the only man-made object visible from orbit, but that’s bunk. The Mercury astronauts reported seeing all kinds of stuff, from trains to oil refineries to Tibetan monasteries. When Gordon Cooper told Houston that he was watching a white big-rig truck travel down a Texas highway, NASA assumed that he must be hallucinating—until workers there later investigated and were actually able to identify the truck in question.

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Dante’s dreamlike
terza rima
poetry doesn’t really lend itself to cartography, but devising “accurate” maps of his Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise nevertheless became a popular pastime during the Renaissance, attracting luminaries from Botticelli to Galileo. It was a faux-academic pursuit, like the “Sherlockians” today who write deadpan scholarly treatises about Holmes and Watson as if they were real historical figures.

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There are also a Riverside, Delaware; a Centerville, Delaware; and a Fairview, Delaware. But you’d expect that—according to the U.S. Geographic Names Information System, Riverside, Centerville, and Fairview are the three most common place-names in America.

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Well, pretty much. Even back in 1983, nobody watched CBS’s morning show.

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Even for three-hundred-year-old jokes, I’ll grant you that these aren’t really very funny. But, hey,
Friends
hasn’t aged all that well either.

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My sense of celebrity geography knowledge was shaped as a child by watching the daytime game show
Win, Lose, or Draw,
a
Pictionary
clone produced by Burt Reynolds, of all people. Whenever the clue was an American place, the celebrity guest—whether it was Tony Danza or Loretta Swit or Dom DeLuise—would always start by drawing on their easel the exact same “map” of America: a vaguely rectangular blob almost tipping over on the right side due to the presence of a ginormous, phallic Florida.

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When the media is disproportionately interested in a story, you’re going to hear about it, whether it’s newsworthy or not. An example that immediately springs to my mind: my six-month residence on the quiz show
Jeopardy!
in 2004 was, I was convinced, just a minor bit of quirky local news that only my close relatives would ever be aware of. I had reckoned without one fact: trivia and game-show geeks, otherwise unemployable, often become pop-culture pundits and radio personalities when they grow up. So my
Jeopardy!
streak became a staple of blogs and drive-time radio, whether anyone else cared or not.

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This may seem a little silly, but local maps have often provided crucial intelligence. In the late 1980s, for example, maps in Iraq started labeling Kuwait as the nineteenth Iraqi province, an early warning sign of trouble years before the tanks actually rolled in.

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And why not? There’s no magical reason for our hemisphere to be at the top, beyond our insidious “north-ism.” Medieval maps were usually aligned so that east was “up,” which is why we use the same word, “orient,” to mean both “the east” and “to spatially align.” NASA’s famous “Big Blue Marble” photo of the Earth from space had south on top when it was taken, so the agency flipped it for publication.

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In 1942, the BBC asked its listeners to send in prewar postcards and holiday snaps from the beaches of Europe. Seven million poured in, showing coastlines from Norway to the Pyrenees, and they were used to select Normandy as the site of the initial landing.

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British mapmakers used every trick in the book to make the empire look its biggest and best. A carefully chosen cylindrical projection would make Canada balloon to many times its actual size, for example, and some maps even spanned the globe through 420 degrees, so that Australia and New Zealand would appear twice, once on each edge of the map.

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Most of the tourists will never know that the location of Four Corners isn’t just desolate—it’s completely arbitrary. The current monument is a result of inexact nineteenth-century surveying, and sits
1,807 feet east
of the actual quadripoint mandated by Congress in 1863. The “real” spot, in case you’re curious, is identical bleak desert, but with fewer souvenir stands selling Navajo blankets.

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That book—
Theatrum Orbis Terrarium,
or “Theater of the World”—is now considered the first modern world atlas. If Ortelius had had his way, today’s atlases would be called “theaters,” but we’ve instead chosen to use the nomenclature of Ortelius’s friend Gerardus Mercator. He dedicated his map book to Atlas—not the Titan who supported the heavens on his shoulders but another mythical character of the same name, a Phoenician philosopher-king said to have invented the first globe.

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Speaking of Ortelius and continents: the cartographer was also the first person to propose the theory of continental drift, based on the way the African and South American coasts seemed to fit together. But others have always gotten the credit, since Ortelius’s 1596 note on the subject wasn’t noticed until 1994!

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Thorpe was a native of Oklahoma who had never set foot in Mauch Chunk, but in 1953, the Pennsylvania township shamelessly
bought
the athlete’s remains from his widow and built a fancy memorial, hoping to stay on the map though its coal industry was dying.

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Similarly, the Filipino town of Sexmoan was a popular destination for American GIs after World War II, but they all made the same disappointing discovery: the name was just a Spanish-era corruption of the local name, “Sasmuan.” In 1987, Sexmoan officially became Sasmuan again for good.

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Or possibly his collaborator, an Alsatian schoolmaster named Matthias Ringmann. There’s good evidence that Waldseemüller drew the maps but left the writing of the preface to his friend.

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There are plenty of American collectors who will buy
only
maps in which California is an island. Maybe they’re hoping to make a killing when Lex Luthor carves off the Golden State, the way he tried to do in the first
Superman
movie.

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In the future, however, when islands disappear from maps, it will probably be because they’ve disappeared from the ocean as well. In March 2010, New Moore Island, a tiny dot in the Bay of Bengal, vanished under the waves due to rising sea levels. India and Bangladesh had hotly disputed claims to the island for years; that problem is now solved, but the region faces more serious problems. Almost a fifth of Bangladesh will be underwater if sea levels rise just one meter over the next forty years, as some climate models predict.

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The existence of this island was taken as an article of faith by sailors of the time, though none of them had ever seen it. Columbus even planned on stopping there on his 1492 voyage and was confused when it was nowhere to be found.

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Raise a toast this Thanksgiving to Francis “Bad Boy” Billington! I love the idea of a rebel pilgrim, presumably with his big black hat worn at a jaunty angle and the silver buckle on it shamefully unpolished. “What art thou rebelling against, Francis?” the town elders would ask him, and “What hast thou got?” would come the surly reply.

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The first survey of this kind was begun in France in the 1670s by Giovanni Cassini, and it proved so daunting that his
grandson
wound up finishing it more than a century later. This was the first topographic map of an entire nation ever made, but it revealed France to be much smaller in area than it had always been drawn. “
Your work has cost me
a large part of my state!” King Louis XIV reportedly huffed. Large-scale triangulation surveys like Cassini’s proved too laborious for other nations to emulate, and so the science died out before roaring back in the 1840s, driven by, well, shit. The
new sanitation systems
being installed in Europe’s large cities were the first construction projects big enough to require the precision of trigonometry.

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Before the Great Trigonometrical Survey, in fact, no one had any clue what the world’s highest mountain even
was
. When Surveyor General Andrew Waugh first published Everest’s height in 1856, he announced it as 29,002 feet above sea level. In fact, the surveyors had calculated the figure at 29,000 feet exactly, but Waugh was afraid no one would believe that suspiciously round number.

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The British borrowed a Hindi word meaning “learned one” to describe these native scouts, and from this we derived a modern word for any self-proclaimed expert. They were called “pundits.”

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Seoul boasts a remarkable 17,219 people per square kilometer. That’s twice as dense as Mexico City and eight times as dense as New York City.

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This was a copy of the same John Smith map discussed in the previous chapter, the first one to feature the name “New England.”

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Rumsey has spent the last decade making many of the 150,000 maps in his collection freely available online via high-quality scans. Dozens of them are now available to peruse as a layer on Google Earth.

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In time, these little cabinets grew into the first natural history museums. Hans Sloane, the London physician called the “last of the universal collectors” (and, incidentally, the inventor of milk chocolate), would invite important guests to his Bloomsbury home to peruse his collection. (During one of these visits, the composer
Handel enraged him
by placing a buttered muffin atop a priceless medieval manuscript.) When Sloane died, he bequeathed his collection to the Crown, and the British Museum was thus founded.

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Wealthy buyers of the 594-map Blaeu atlas of 1665 could even pay a little extra to have their family coat of arms stamped in gold upon the cover. Compare that with the shoddy way our atlases must live today, crumpled in the backseats of our cars under an avalanche of fast-food receipts (or, if one has kids, Goldfish crackers).