The history is full of amazing people who showed us what you can do if you don’t give up. These are stories of failure, struggle and success. One example is Bernard J.S. Cahill (1866–1944). The paper “An account of a new land map op the world”, which he published in 1909, describes his struggles on the way to improve the projection of the world on a map. Back then, one famous map projection was the Mercator projection. It is based on a linear grid representing the longitudes and latitudes. That was helpful for navigation on the sea, but resulted in wrong projections of land forms. “Every map of the world must be a compromise, and in every map something must be sacrificed in order to lay a spherical superficies on a flat plane.” Because of the parallel latitudes, the poles are enlarged to the same size as the equator and the forms of the continents are exaggerated and distorted. Cahill, however, wanted a map which projected the forms of the continents without rupture or distortion. It should be a map not for navigators, but for geographers and scientists in general. Cahill worked eagerly for this idea and created a map which served his needs, when he had to face a stroke of fate: ”Then came the great earthquake and fire of San Francisco (April 18, 1906), and my maps and diagrams were all burned along with every- thing else I possessed, both in my office and in my home.” His work was gone, and he had to start again from the beginning. “Within a year I was back at the problem, which I approached this time in a more scientific spirit.” He calculated and tried many different ways of mapping the land of the world and it was worth it: Cahill invented the octahedral butterfly map. His concept of plotting the world in a series of eight triangular planes enabled a projection of the landforms without rupture or major distortion. And even better: Cahills projection method showed such a high accuracy that it was the base for the more recent (1975) Cahill–Keyes projection. That is a story of success, isn't it? An account of a new land map op the world.
Bernard J.S. Cahill The Scottish Geographical Magazine 25.9 (1909): 449-469
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IdeaI love to increase my general science knowledge by reading papers from different fields of science. Here I share some of them. Archiv
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