The squareness of Egypt is certainly aesthetically pleasing. For such a solid-looking country, however, it’s ironic that 95% of its people lives on only 5% of its land area. In other words, within 10km of the banks of the river Nile and its delta. Maps can sometimes be misleading in this way. Atlases and globes are endlessly fascinating nevertheless. A globe, in particular, can have an almost hypnotic effect. One can look at it from above and from the side and from below and also round and round. What one cannot do, however, is look at it all at once in its entirety.
If you were to take a pair of scissors to a globe and cut it open to try to flatten it out into a regular map, you wouldn’t be able to do so. It will always crease or ruffle. This problem of flattening a globe and producing a 2-dimensional map from a 3-dimensional sphere has been known since at least the 16th century. It wouldn’t be for another 300 years, however, until this conundrum was satisfactorily explained in mathematical terms. This was by Brunswick mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss while working on the survey of Hanover in the 1820s in the employ of koenig Georg IV (who was also king George IV of Great Britain & Ireland). Gauss’ 1827 publication
Disquisitiones Generales Circa Superficies Curvas (
General Investigations of Curved Surfaces) is seen as definitive in this field. Consequently, a variety of competing map projections have been used down the ages with each having positive and negative features. Any map will inevitably distort the globe to some extent. Members of the
Flat Earth Society, of course, would say that the problem isn’t so much one of trying to make a flat map from a globe but rather trying to make a globe from a flat map. But that’s maybe for another thread.
The same basic problem of map distortion exists even with computer-generated virtual globes. It cannot really be got away from. The following site, however, goes some way towards trying to remedy this:
The true sizeIt enables you to select and drag countries across a map to gauge their relative sizes. Countries nearer the poles become smaller the closer they get to the equator, while countries nearer the equator become larger the closer they get to the poles. The site defaults with India, China and America superimposed upon Africa. It can be refreshed by clicking ‘Clear Map’ in the control box on the top left hand side. You can also rotate a selected country by sliding the compass icon at the bottom left. If, like me, you thought that Finland was a huge country with endless forests and lakes, then just drag it south to the Congo to see how small it really is. Or if you thought that Malawi was a small country (it is by African standards) then just drag it north to see that it’s virtually the same length as Italy.
It's reminiscent of Henrique Galvão’s famous map from 1934 entitled
Portugal não é um país pequeno (Portugal is not a small country) which superimposed Portugal’s overseas territories onto Europe. In it Mozambique dwarfed Spain and France together, while Angola covered Germany, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and much of the rest of central Europe besides. It was believed to have been inspired by an earlier map entitled
De uitgestrektheid van Nederlandsch Oost-Indie (
The vast extent of the Dutch East Indies) in which the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia) were shown to stretch from Ireland to Uzbekistan. In turn it has prompted parodies such as
Norge er ikke et lite land (
Norway is not a little land) with Norway’s barren slice of ice i.e. Queen Maud Land (the Norwegian Antarctic territory) shown stretching from Oslo to Paris to Moscow to Athens.
It is fun to use though. Some of the islands are quite interesting for instance. Taiwan can easily fit inside Ireland, while diamond-shaped Singapore (and this takes a bit of patience and determination to do) fits almost exactly over the diamond-shape of the Isle of Wight. Alternatively, you can create a parallel world. Instead of Dover being 26 miles north-west of Calais then how about placing it 26 miles north-west of Corunna in Galicia. That way London would be on the same latitude as Nice while Edinburgh would be on the same latitude as Paris. Britain becomes the mythical Lyonesse.
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