Maps

Ten thousand years of humans drawing the world — from Babylonian clay tablets to satellite imagery.

23 posts· 11660 BCE – 2012

• Apple Maps and the city it couldn't find 2012
• Waze and the map that never stopped moving 2008
• Google Street View and the view from the curb 2007
• Google Maps: the map you could drag 2005
• OpenStreetMap: the map a bicycle started 2004
• MapQuest, then Google Maps: the web learns where it is 1996
• Navstar 1 and the clock that tells you where to turn 1978
• Landsat 1: the satellite that corrected the charts 1972
• Aerial photogrammetry: the camera that replaced the surveyor 1944
• Beck's Underground map: the diagram that replaced the map 1933
• The Ordnance Survey: how Britain measured itself into existence 1791
• The Cassini survey: four generations to map a kingdom 1747
• Mercator's projection: the map that straightened the sea 1569
• The map that named America 1507
• The Hereford Mappa Mundi: the world as it was meant to be 1300
• The Book of Roger: al-Idrisi maps the world in silver 1154
• Al-Idrisi's silver map, or how a Norman king bought the world 1154
• Tabula Peutingeriana: seven metres of Roman roads 400 CE
• Ptolemy's Geography and the grid that outlasted Rome 150 CE
• Eratosthenes measures the Earth, or how a shadow told the whole story 240 BCE
• Anaximander's world map, or how a philosopher drew the whole earth 550 BCE
• The Babylonian world map, or how an empire drew the edge of everything 600 BCE
• The Abauntz map, or how a hunter scratched the world onto a stone 11660 BCE