From Ptolemy to GPS, the Brief History of Maps

By Clive Thompson, Smithsonian Magazine on 08.28.17

Word Count 1,111
Level 940L

Martin Waldseemüller's world map, including inset maps of Ptolemy's Old World and Amerigo Vespucci's account of the New World, 1507.
Image by: University of Minnesota via Wikimedia.

Last spring, a 23-year-old woman was driving her car through the Canadian town of Tobermory. It
was unfamiliar territory for her, so she was following her GPS, which stands for Global Positioning
System. Indeed, she was so focused on following the device that she didn't notice that she was
headed straight for Georgian Bay. The young woman drove straight into the freezing water. She
thankfully managed to climb out and swim to shore. Her bright red car sank beneath the waves.

Accidents like this have become weirdly common. In New York City, one man followed his GPS
into a park, where his car got stuck on a staircase. And in Europe, a Belgian woman was led
remarkably astray by her GPS, turning a short drive to Brussels into a daylong voyage into
Germany and beyond. Amazingly, she just patiently followed the computer's instructions.
Eventually she noticed that the street signs were in another language.

You can laugh, but many of us have stopped paying attention to the world around us because we
are too focused on following directions. Some observers worry that this represents a dangerous
shift in our style of navigation. Scientists say that humans normally have an "internal compass." In
other words, we tend to have an idea of where we are in our neighborhoods, our cities, the world.

This article is available at 5 reading levels at https://newsela.com.

Finding our place in the world

Is it possible that today’s GPS devices and smartphones are affecting our ability to navigate? Will
technology change forever how we get around?

The answer is that it already has. Three thousand years ago, our ancestors began a long
experiment in figuring out how they fit into the world. They invented a bold new tool called the
map.

One of the oldest surviving maps is the Babylonian Map of the World. Ironically, it is about the
size and shape of an early iPhone. A clay tablet created around 500 to 700 B.C. in Mesopotamia,
the map shows a circular Babylon at the center, surrounded by the ocean. It doesn't have much
detail, but it wasn't meant for navigation. Its purpose was simpler; to help the mapholder grasp
the idea of the whole world, with himself at the center.

The first great attempt to make mapping realistic came in around A.D. 100. Claudius Ptolemy was
an astronomer and astrologer obsessed with making accurate horoscopes. These were diagrams of
the heavens used to predict events. For the horoscopes to be accurate, people's birth towns had to
be precisely placed on a world map. In the effort to create better horoscopes, Ptolemy ended up
inventing geography.

Ptolemy gathered documents detailing the locations of towns, and he supplemented that
information with the tales of travelers. By the time he was done, he had invented a system of lines
of latitude and longitude. Ptolemy plotted some 10,000 locations - from Britain to Europe, Asia
and North Africa. He even invented ways to flatten the 3-D planet onto a 2-D map. He called his
new method "geography."

After the Roman Empire fell, Ptolemy’s realistic geography was lost to much of the world for
almost 1,000 years. Once again, maps were concerned more with storytelling. Christian
mapmakers produced mappaemundi, which were designed to show the story of Jesus. The most
famous of these was made in Hereford, England - a giant creation drawn on a single animal skin.
It showed pictures of Adam and Eve tossed out of Eden and many other stories from the Bible. The
map wasn’t intended to get you from town to town, it was designed to guide you to heaven.

The evolution of mapmaking

As the Renaissance began, maps started to improve. Business demanded it. Ships were crossing
oceans. Kings were building vast empires and needed to chart their lands. New technologies
helped make maps more accurate. The creation of reliable compasses helped create “portolan”
maps. These had lines crisscrossing the sea from port to port, helping guide sailors. Ptolemy’s
ancient work was rediscovered, and new maps were drawn based on his 1,000-year-old
calculations.

By the late 19th century, new developments in math and technology led to an increase in
mapmaking. In France, the Cassini family crisscrossed the country to calculate its dimensions with
precision never before seen. Their trick was using “triangulation” - a bit of math - to let them stitch
together thousands of measurements. Breakthroughs in binocular lenses allowed surveyors to
measure many miles at a glance. World maps became increasingly accurate.

This article is available at 5 reading levels at https://newsela.com.

These days, our maps seem alive. They speak to us, telling us precisely where to go, guided by the
satellites and mapping of companies like Waze, Google, Bing and Mapquest. "There’s something
fun about turn-by-turn directions," says author Greg Milner, who has written about the history of
maps. There’s no need even to orient yourself to north. The robot voice tells you to turn right, turn
left, with you always at the center.

Relying too much on technology

Milner worries, though, that GPS is weakening something important in ourselves. He believes it is
hurting how well we remember the details of the world around us. A 2008 study compared
people's knowledge of a city with the method they used to navigate it. The study found that people
who used GPS had a weak grasp of the terrain, but those who used a paper map or who learned
through direct experience remembered the area better.

Map collector David Rumsey isn’t convinced of this loss, though. He argues that the convenience
of GPS and online mapping means we live in a world with more maps than ever before. Many
online searches, for example, show a map as part of the search results. People today see far more
maps in a single day than they used to, Rumsey notes. When he first started collecting and
displaying maps in the 1970s, people asked why bother? Now when people visit his collection at
Stanford University, they "get it right away. That’s because they’ve been exposed."

It’s possible both effects are true. We still see a map when we follow directions on our phones. It's
possible that we look at the little maps enough to remember them quite well.

Technology hasn't changed some of our oldest urges. Historian Jerry Brotton once visited Google,
where the engineers showed him a huge, wall-sized version of Google Earth. They asked him,
whenever a visitor shows up to try it out, what’s the first thing they zoom in to look for? Their own
home.

"They go, wow, look at that!" Brotton says. They're like the people who held that Babylonian clay
tablet nearly 3,000 years ago - using a map to figure out their place in the world.

This article is available at 5 reading levels at https://newsela.com.