"By the late 17th century, with joint stock companies mapping every corner of the world, anonymous teams of people are crunching data and producing maps." Blaeu's market-oriented maps weren't cutting-edge. But he did break with a mapmaking tradition dating back to Ptolemy of placing the earth at the center of the universe. At the top of the map, the sun is at the center of personifications of the five known planets at the time-in a nod to Copernicus's theory of the cosmos, even as the earth, divided into two hemispheres, remains at the center of the map, in deference to Ptolemy (Ptolemy is in the upper left, and Copernicus in the upper right). "Blau quietly, cautiously says I think Copernicus is probably right," Brotton says.
In 1973, the left-wing German historian Arno Peters unveiled an alternative to Mercator's allegedly Eurocentric projection: a world map depicting countries and continents according to their actual surface area-hence the smaller-than-expected northern continents, and Africa and South America appearing, in Brotton's words, "like long, distended tear drops." The 'equal area' projection, which was nearly identical to an earlier design by the Scottish clergyman James Gall, was a hit with the press and progressive NGOs. But critics argued that any projection of a spherical surface onto a plane surface involves distortions, and that Peters had amplified these by committing serious mathematical errors. "No map is any better or worse than any other map," Brotton says.
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