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francisdavey 15 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Is it popular though? When I studied Geography at school, we had a standard school atlas that was used by a huge number of schools throughout the country and across several generations. It had maps on essentially every page - of course. Only one was Mercator: showing time zones. That's it.

Growing up, I did not see Mercator at all often.

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bazoom42 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> ask yourself why the mercator projection was so popular for so long

Besause maps was developed as tools for navigation.

But if you want an idea of the relative sizes and positions of the countries of the world, you should use a globe.

Regarding colonization, I’d note that Greenland, Canada and Siberia wasn’t the greatest colonizers. The conspiracy theory about Marcator justifying colonization does not really make sense. Norway, Iceland and Greenland gets a much bigger size boost than Spain, France and UK. But Greenland was colonized, not a colonizer.

	▲	littlestymaar 14 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Besause maps was developed as tools for navigation. It's not perfect for navigation either, especially over long distance if you want to navigate from Europe to the US, going in straight line over a Mercator projection is going to make your trip much longer than it ought to be. So while it makes sense for smaller-scale maps because the angles are preserved, it's totally pointless for a world map. As an example compare this to the straigh line between Edinburgh and Miami in mercator projection: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=edinburgh+miami

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luckylion 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> However, ask yourself why the mercator projection was so popular for so long, and why resistance to other projections took so long to counter.

Wasn't that primarily because of sea trade and the mercator projection being very useful for that because you can draw a straight line on it and then set a straight course?

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littlestymaar 14 hours ago | parent [-]

As I said in another comment[1] this is only true at small scale. As soon as you start crossing oceans, you absolutely do not want to navigate in straight line as it's going to inflate your travel by a significant amount of distance.

As such, while the Mercator projection makes total sense for a map of northern Europe or the Caribbean, it makes absolutely no sense as a map of the entire world.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45002873

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luckylion 13 hours ago | parent [-]

Did they have better map projections for cross-oceanic navigation 500 years ago when the mercator projection was invented?

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littlestymaar 9 hours ago | parent [-]

AFAIK you'd need a projection for each origin/destination pair, so it's not exactly convenient. A globe is by far the best tool for such a job.

	▲	luckylion 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		But globes aren't really that practical for navigation. You can plan your voyage, but when you're at sea, how do you make sure you're going in the right direction? Mercator has the advantage that you can use your compass and as long as you stay on course, you'll arrive at your destination. Keep in mind: that's 500 years ago, not 50 years ago. There's no question that we have better tools today but the question was why the mercator projection was so successful it became the default. I think "it was super useful at the time because it made navigation easy, reliable, and available to everyone, at any any weather" is a much more compelling explanation than "the would-be colonizers spread it because their home-countries were enlarged and they liked that and used it to oppress the equatorial countries".