The Global Positioning System was completed in 1994, with a total of twenty-four satellites in orbit around the Earth. The United States military, however, was nervous about allowing others–particularly the country’s enemies–to access the same location information, and so launched a civil version containing deliberate inaccuracies of several hundred metres. Many protested–including the Federal Aviation Administration, Department of Transportation and Coast Guard–and on the night before 1 May in the year 2000, President Bill Clinton made GPS open for everyone, bringing Gore’s vision of a Digital Earth yet another step closer.
Google Maps’ map of Manhattan from 2007. The colours are somewhat different from those used today–here, all the buildings are grey, while in 2016 some of them began to be coloured a light shade of orange, initially causing confusion. What did it mean? The difference between residential and commercial areas, perhaps? No. Google had decided that ‘interesting areas’ should be highlighted. It is also interesting to note that the 2007 version features no advertising.
ONLINE MAPS | Computing company Silicon Graphics had been working on a program that would allow people to view and zoom in on Earth from space since long before Al Gore’s speech. They achieved this using a smart technology called ‘clipmapping’, which permits a large image, such as a map of Europe measuring 420,000 × 300,000 pixels, to be displayed in a smaller version on a computer screen with a resolution of just 1024 × 768 pixels. Each of the pixels on the screen corresponds to a far greater number of pixels below it. First the entire continent is presented on screen, but if you click on the magnifying glass or plus symbol, or double-click on the area you would like to view in more detail, such as the north-west, this part of the map is then enlarged while the rest of the map is clipped away. Click–you see the British Isles; click, south-east England; click, Greater London; click, Camden Town; click, Chalk Farm Road; click, the statue of Amy Winehouse and Camden Market. Every time you drill down into the image, the technology clips away everything you’re not interested in, so that you finally end up down in the smallest details of an image that in reality is far larger than the screen.
Inspired by Gore’s speech, Silicon Graphics launched their Earthviewer software in 2001. Those who purchased it could fly above a three-dimensional, digital version of the world at a speed and resolution never seen before. Countries other than the USA were fairly poorly reproduced, however–the company simply didn’t have enough money to purchase all the necessary satellite images. But the software was good enough that American TV channels used it when the war against Iraq broke out in March 2003. In-Q-Tel, a company financed by the CIA, invested in Earthviewer just a few weeks before the invasion, and are said to have used it to assist the troops. Six versions of the software were published before Google acquired Earthviewer for an undisclosed sum in 2004, just a few weeks after acquiring digital mapping company Where2.
It was logical that the makers of the Google search engine would be interested in maps–around 30 per cent of Internet searches are about where something is. As early as 2002, Google had started purchasing satellite images from DigitalGlobe–a company with two satellites that photographed one million square kilometres of the Earth’s surface at a half-metre resolution every single day. These images, worth several hundred million dollars, were added to Earthviewer to create Google Earth, which was launched in June 2005–‘a valuable addition to Google’s efforts to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,’ as Google described the project. Google Maps had also been launched online just a few months earlier.
GOOGLE EARTH | When the program opens, Google Earth presents the day side of the Earth in blue, green, white and brown from a distance of 11,000 kilometres, like a lit globe against the pitch darkness of space. This is not only an image of the globe as it was described by Socrates, Cicero, Macrobius and von Braun in a digital and two-dimensional form, but also a geographic information system containing over twenty petabytes of data–equivalent to a textbook with ten thousand billion pages. All this information is drawn on in just seconds as the user navigates around the Earth or down towards it–the images are updated fifty times a second. In the menu to the left you can choose which map you’d like to layer over the terrain, depending on whether you’re most interested in viewing the world with or without national borders, roads and place names; you can also select or deselect a number of functions that show various aspects of the globe. Selecting ‘Global awareness’ displays a range of symbols that you can click on to obtain more information, and which provide details of projects such as the World Wide Fund For Nature (WWF) panda conservation programme in the Qinling Mountains in China. Selecting ‘Gallery’ and ‘Rumsey Historical Maps’ displays a number of circles; clicking on these allows you to browse historical maps from the collection of American map collector David Rumsey–including a map of Scandinavia from 1794.
We are able to interact with Google Earth and Google Maps in a way that would never be possible using a paper-based map or atlas. Selecting ‘Images’ presents thousands of images, uploaded by users across the world, from Jerusalem to the beaches of Malibu. The system is also open to user participation–when a Slovenian city incorrectly ended up on the Italian side of the border, a user corrected the error; the fact that someone had written ‘No Human Rights Here’ in Tibet, which was occupied by China in 1965, resulted in extensive debate. Inaccuracies sometimes occur; a completely erroneous name was once entered for a bridge in Prague, and someone might upload an image at an incorrect location–but there is no doubt that Google Earth allows people to influence the image created of their surroundings in a way that would never have been possible at any previous point in cartographic history. Four hundred years ago, it might have been possible to send a map of Tuscany to Abraham Ortelius so that he could more accurately reproduce the area in his next edition of the Theatrum orbis terrarum–but how many people had the opportunity to do so? And regardless, it was then up to Ortelius to decide whether or not he wished to update his map.
Google Earth is a fantastic tool for getting to know our planet–using it, we can explore the historic cities of Angkor Wat, Machu Picchu and Pompeii, travel to the highest mountaintops, visit the Arctic and Antarctic and take a tour of the Amazon rainforest, Alaska, Alexandria, Bangkok or Chicago… and yet there is also a search field into which I may type, for example, ‘Pizza near Ullevål, Oslo’. And if I type ‘pizza’ into Google’s search engine online, the top of the results page features a paid advertisement for a company offering pizza home delivery, and below this a map from Google Maps shows the locations of three pizza restaurants directly north, east and south of where I live.
This detail confirms what Waldo Tobler called the First Law of Geography: ‘Everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things.’ Google has understood that maps are primarily everyday tools–something we use to find a new store or the home of someone selling a used bicycle online–and much more rarely a starting point for daydreams of distant journeys. And this is exactly why Google is able to provide us with maps for free–by selling advertising to pizza restaurants and others in our local surroundings. As English cartographic historian Jerry Brotton states, Google Maps ‘is partly a tool for delivering ads.’
This is a reminder that maps are not created in isolation. Ptolemy I Soter established the museum and library in Alexandria because knowledge generated trade; the Italian nautical charts that paved the way for more accurate medieval maps were created for travelling merchants; Abraham Ortelius got the idea for his atlas from a seaman who needed more practical maps; the Dutch East India Company paid two generations of the Blaeu family to create maps of the valuable Spice Islands; the pizza restaurants who pay for ads on Google Earth and Google Maps help to pay for the next round of satellite images that will produce even more accurate maps. ‘Where maps and their makers are motivated by the apparently disinterested pursuit of geographical information, its acqui
sition requires patronage, state funding or commercial capital to make it viable. Mapping and money have always gone hand in hand and have reflected the vested interests of particular rulers, states, businesses or multinational corporations, but this does not necessarily negate the innovations made by the map-makers they have financed,’ Brotton believes.
But now the question is whether Google has become too dominant a force. Competing map services–even those created by large corporations such as Apple, Microsoft and Yahoo–are squeezed by Google’s huge 70 per cent market share. ‘It is vital that regulators work fast to reinstate mapping plurality and avert the steady disappearance of Google’s competitors in this sector,’ wrote ICOMP, an organisation that works to ensure free and fair trade online, in a report in 2012. Simon Greenman, founder of mapquest.com, believes that although Google ‘have done a wonderful job with Earth,’ they also ‘have the potential to dominate world mapping on a scale that is historically unprecedented. If we fast forward ten to twenty years Google will own global mapping and geospatial applications.’
THE FUTURE | The first rocket shot into space by Wernher von Braun and his employees on 3 October 1942 was decorated with Mrs Luna, a personified pin-up style image of the Moon and nod to the German film Frau im Mond (Woman in the Moon) from 1929, which showed cinema audiences how a modern rocket worked for the very first time. In 2008, private satellite company GeoEye sent up a rocket featuring Google’s logo to denote that the tech giant had already placed an order for all the photographs that would be taken by the new satellite. Google had purchased a permanent seat in Greek god Apollo’s chariot–and six years later bought their own chariot when they acquired the company Skybox Imaging and its seven satellites.
The only limiting factor in how much information can be added to Google Earth and Google Maps is the available data storage capacity–and this is currently increasing faster than the data can be collected. Does this mean that we are now finally in a position to create the perfect map that cartographers have dreamed of since the dawn of time? Is it now possible to create a map of the world on our computers at a scale of 1:1? Ed Parsons, a geotechnologist at Google, says yes: ‘If you talk to most people involved in Internet mapping and doing what we do we completely accept the fact that you could build a one-to-one map.’
The usefulness of such a map–whether anyone is really interested in being able to see holes in the tarmac on Fifth Avenue in New York from their home computer–is one thing. Another issue is that, like every other map created throughout history, the project would have to tackle the problem of reproducing a spherical globe on a flat surface. As soon as you pulled back from the 1:1 perspective–as would often be necessary, as only so much can be displayed on a computer screen–the problem of projection would once again rear its head. Google is already forced to manipulate its images to simulate the curvature of the Earth, and runs into difficulties in the regions to the north and south where the lines of latitude pull together–and the mathematical solution to this problem involves a number of compromises.
Maps are images of the world–representations of a world view. All the maps described in this book represent various ways of seeing the world, from the speculations of the ancient Greeks to the religious faith of the Middle Ages; from the scientific experimentation and objective mapping of the Renaissance to the collection of enormous volumes of data in today’s digital age. Common to the cartographers of every age throughout history is that the ways in which they choose to present the world say much about what they consider important–and the opportunities that their age affords them.
The world is a theatre in which our history is constantly being played out. Ortelius described the maps of his time as enabling people to ‘see that which was done, and where it was done, as if it were happening in the present’–which sounds rather prophetic looking back from an age in which digital maps are able to update users on the current traffic situation almost in real time. Since the age of Ortelius, the duration for which maps remain relevant has been drastically reduced. Ortelius’s works were set aside after thirty years–might we eventually create maps that are updated minute by minute, showing houses being built and torn down; the progress of landslides and floods; the number of people strolling along the promenade at Alexandria, ships on their way to Indonesia and planes flying across the American continent–so that we will truly be able to see the entire world ‘in the present’? In terms of technology, such a map is not necessarily such a long way off. Even now, digital maps are updated with four new satellite images per day. What we can be sure of is that the maps of the future will seem as strange to us as our hand-held mobile maps would have seemed to Ptolemy, Mercator and Ortelius–and in 400 years’ time, our extraordinary digital maps will seem as simple as the Theatrum orbis terrarum does today.
REFERENCES
The history of maps has been told in various ways by several others before me. The standard work is The History of Cartography, a multivolume project started by J. B. Harley and David Woodward at the University of Chicago in 1987, and which is still to be completed. All the volumes, with the exception of the most recent, have generously been made available for download at press.uchicago.edu/books/HOC/index.html. Just be aware that some of the details included in the first volumes are now outdated.
Another book I have found extremely useful is A History of the World in Twelve Maps by Jerry Brotton. Fridtjof Nansen’s book In Northern Mists discusses Norway and the Nordic region as depicted through old texts and maps. This and many more of the books I have referenced have been scanned and made available on the National Library of Norway’s website. A good overview, together with many reproductions of old maps, can be found in Printed Maps of Scandinavia and the Arctic, 1482–1601 and Maps and Mapping of Norway, 1602–1855 by William B. Ginsberg. Soundings by Hali Felt is an excellent biography of Marie Tharp; Arctic Labyrinth: The Quest for the Northwest Passage by Glyn Williams is a unique and useful book; Imagined Corners by Paul Binding is a fascinating read about Abraham Ortelius and the city of Antwerp in Ortelius’s time; both Nicholas Crane and Andrew Taylor have written good biographies about Gerard Mercator, and The World Map 1300–1492 by Evelyn Edson should be read by everyone.
I understand neither Greek nor Latin, nor any other languages apart from English to any great extent, and have therefore been forced to translate primary sources unavailable in Norwegian from the English where necessary.
PREFACE
‘Oh, my God!’ | ‘Apollo 8 Onboard Voice Transcription’, NASA, Houston, 1969. William Anders was also the U.S. Ambassador to Norway from 1976 to 1977.
Ortelius | The original poem is as follows: ‘Ortelius, quem quadrijugo super aera curru Phæbus Apollo vehi secum dedit, unde jacentes Lustraret terras, circumfusumque profondum.’ Translated into Norwegian by Tor Ivar Østmoe.
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‘All the world’s a stage’ | Shakespeare.
THE FIRST IMAGES OF THE WORLD
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A large, advanced rock carving | Craig, 366–7.
‘Next, in order’ | Strabo, book 4, chapter 6, section 8.
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Italian archaeologist Alberto Marretta | Schellenberg, 05:45.
Norwegian archaeologist | Marstrander, 247.
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Minusinsk, Russia | Smith (1994), 3.
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Humans also acquired | Lewis, 51.
PAGES 8–9:
In 1967, British archaeologist | Jennings, 7.
Seven years later | sci-news.com.
At Talat N’lisk | Smith (1987), 17.
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‘As a rule’ | Cited in Smith (1987), 85.
PAGES 10–11:
In the Sahara | Smith (1987), 89.
A painstakingly crafted cave painting | Smith (1994), 14.
In the early 1700s | Gabrielsen, 8.
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At first there was only darkness | From A. L. Basham’s translation of the Rig Veda (1954).
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Every place and time | Bringsværd & Braarvig, 9.
‘That which at some points in time’ | Bringsværd & Braarvig, 10.
‘This ash is the best’ | Snorri Sturluson, The Younger Edda. Translated by Rasmus B. Anderson (1901).
‘Of Ymir’s flesh’ | The Elder Edda of Saemund Sigfusson. Translated by Benjamin Thorpe (1866).
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‘There earth, there heaven’ | Homer, The Iliad. Translated by Alexander Pope (1715).
A similar problem | Thank you to Benedicte Gamborg Briså for providing me with information about the classical view of the world and the challenges of translation.
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Babylon is at the centre | Brotton, 1.
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Before the Babylonians, the Sumerians | Millard, 107.
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One such example | Nemet-Nejat, 95.
They used a measuring rope | Nemet-Nejat, 93.
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Like the Sumerians and the Babylonians | Shore, 117.
In his Histories | Translated by A. D. Godley (1920)
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Around the year 1150 BC | Harrell. Amennakhte did not sign the map, but we know that he drew it because his handwriting is recognisable from other works.
LIKE FROGS ABOUT A POND
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During antiquity, Alexandria | The description of Alexandria and its library is based on ‘Science’ in Jerry Brotton’s A History of the World in Twelve Maps and Ancient Libraries by Oikonomopoulou & Woolf.
‘a tower of great height’ | Caesar, The Civil War
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‘building[s] upon building[s]’ | Strabo, book 17, chapter 1, section 8.
Theater of the World Page 31
