We often see “Mercator” or “Mercator” written in the corner of a geographical map, we hear this word when weather forecast is broadcast on NTV and in many other cases. And no wonder - translated from Latin this word means "merchant", "merchant". And many firms have chosen such a name.
But the card merchants like this name doubly. Such a Latin name was chosen for himself almost 500 years ago by a man by the name of Kremer, which also means "merchant" in German. He himself did not trade in anything, however, his work contributed to the development of world trade. This was the era of great geographical discoveries. The travels of Columbus, Vasco da Gama, Magellan would not have changed humanity's ideas about the world around them if they had not been comprehended and framed in the form of a new geography. This task was completed by Gerard Mercator.
Gerard Kremer was born on March 5, 1512 in East Flanders, in Rüpelmond (modern Belgium). He studied first at the gymnasium in 's-Hertogenbosch (now the Netherlands), and then entered the University of Louvain (now Belgium), where he became a student of the geographer and printmaker Rainer Gemma-Vries. Mercator, starting with engraving work, moved on to making globes, astrolabes and other astronomical instruments. At the same time, Mercator is involved in the development of the mathematical foundations of cartography. The main difficulty was that due to the spherical shape of the Earth, its surface cannot be depicted on a plane without distortion, and it was necessary to find a way in which the images of the oceans and continents on the map would look the most similar.
Already in those days, there were many options for the projection of the spherical Earth on a flat map. Mercator proposed one of the most common now, cylindrical - it now bears his name. Imagine that the Earth-ball is wrapped with a roll of paper in the form of a cylinder. Just like Shurik in Gaidai's film wrapped the hooligan Fedya with wallpaper. If you then light a candle in the center of the ball, and draw a contour around the shadows that the continents and seas cast on the inner side of the cylinder, then after unrolling the paper you will get a map in the Mercator projection.
The distances in the Mercator projection were not maintained - they increased towards the polar regions. Remember, at the top of the school map of the USSR was the huge Arctic Ocean? And on other maps there was a huge Antarctica. But in the Mercator projection, all angles and directions were correct. For navigation and land travel, knowing the direction of travel is much more important than the distance.
In 1544, Mercator published a 15-sheet map of Europe. On it, for the first time, he correctly showed the outlines of the Mediterranean Sea, eliminated mistakes that have been repeated since the time of the ancient Greek geographer Ptolemy. In 1563, Mercator made a map of Lorraine, and in 1564 - the British Isles (on 8 sheets). In 1569, Mercator published his Chronology, an overview of his astronomical and cartographic works. Three years later he issued a new map of Europe on 15 sheets, and in 1578 - engraved maps for a new edition of the "Geography of Ptolemy".
In 1571, Mercator completed the main work of his life - a comprehensive work on cosmography. Thinking about its name, Mercator remembered the myth of Atlas, who was condemned to hold the firmament on his shoulders. He called the collection of maps of the entire earth's surface, as if holding the heavens, an atlas. Since then, the word "atlas" has become commonplace for a collection of maps. Mercator's "Atlas, or Cartographic Considerations about the Creation of the World and the View of the Created World" consisted of 111 maps and represented all open lands in a new projection. The Atlas was published only in 1595, a year after the death of the author, which followed on December 2, 1594.
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And we still use atlases and projections of Mercator …
