A fugitive history of world map projections, found!

Bernard Cahill’s Butterfly Map from his 1909 Account

A few years ago, just before covid-19 shut everything down in 2020, I encountered a reference to a 1952 MA thesis that seemed of great potential interest for me. [n1] The reference turned into a bit of a library quest that I finally completed yesterday, with mixed results for my larger project on the history of the usage of world map projections.

I’d done a bit of work on the patterns of the use of projections for world maps in the early modern period, and I’ve thought about extending it into the modern era. It’s not just the question of the respective use made of Mercator’s projection for world maps, but also the co-existence in modern atlases of multiple world maps, generally one continuous (Mercator or some other replacement, like the Gall Stereographic [n2] or the Mollweide) and one double-hemisphere. I saw in the early modern period a process of development of rectangular world maps for marine purposes: world maps in the style of portolan charts, then simpler rectangular maps (without all the rhumb lines), giving way after 1569 to maps on Mercator’s projection; by contrast, the great majority of world maps after 1600 were double-hemisphere in shape and projected on the transverse azimuthal stereographic.

Incidence of basic map projection types in printed world maps 1472–1700 in the European tradition. Data from Shirley’s bibliography of world maps (1983)

I was wondering if, during the modern era, there had been a similar sequential development—a tension between tradition/convention and innovation—in the use of the double-hemisphere maps and in the adoption of newer alternative projections. That is, can one identify coexisting threads of world maps that shift in line with social and cultural changes.

In this light, the MA thesis looked potentially useful:

Botley, F. V. 1952. “British and American World Map Projections from 1850–1950.” MA thesis. Geography. Birkbeck College, University of London.

Botley is known for some innovative proposals for reimagining world maps immediately after the war (Botley 1949; Botley 1951a; Botley 1951b; Botley 1951c), and some of his proposals have informed later histories of alternative map projections (Dahlberg 1962; Snyder 1993; Pędzich 2016). He then undertook this thesis at Birkbeck College, the University of London’s college for adult/mature/non-traditional students, under the supervision of Eila M. J. Campbell. I find no further academic publications by Botley, other than a faceted globe that he and Campbell issued (instance at the Newberry Library). I think it likely that he was the F. V. Botley who taught math and science at a London school at about the time that 3/4 of the members of The Who attended it.

Richard Dahlberg (1962, n7) had plainly read Botley’s MA thesis, and it is listed in John Snyder and Harry Steward’s (1988) bibliography of map projection literature.

It seemed that Botley might provide just the kind of perspective that I was looking for.

How might I get to see it?

There was no copy identified in worldcat.org, whether in the USA or the UK. I did not find it in the online catalog of the Birkbeck College library; nor in the University of London’s Senate House Library. Nor in the British Library catalog. I contacted the college’s librarian, who told me that the college had passed all its old theses over to the Senate House library, which had subsequently discarded them. There seemed to be no copy in Eila Campbell’s papers. I thought to try the library of the Royal Geographical Society; however, the librarian could confirm that they had some kind of record for the thesis, but was unable to actually check the shelves until they were permitted to reenter the building once the epidemic had tailed off. I put the quest on hold.

I was reminded of the hint, though, when a search of my personal literature database generated a hit to Botley’s thesis in addition to whatever I was looking for, and I remembered that my colleague Katie Parker had just started a new position as the RGS map curator. She was still learning the ropes and did not have the capacity to go hunting both for the step-ladder needed to reach the locked cabinet in which the thesis perhaps resided and for the key needed to open the said cabinet, before a period of maternity leave took her temporarily away from the library. However, as I’m in London for a few days, I thought to have the other librarians seek for the work and to consult it in person, which I did yesterday.

Anyway, Botley’s thesis was indeed awaiting me in the RGS’s new reading room.

Titlepage to Botley (1952)

Triumph! It turns out to be a large work: 262 pages, plus detailed table of contents and about 12 plates. Say 280 pages total. Botley had given it, with some small ms corrections, to the RGS in 1955. Here’s the general table of contents:

I. Introduction [pp. 1–40]

Scope of the Work

Modern Knowledge of Map Projections

The Properties of Map Projections

Distributions [Thematic Maps] and Their Mathematical Requirements

II. Factors Influencing the Development of the World Map [pp. 41–57]

Distribution Geography

Transport and Communications

III. The World Map, 1790–1849 [pp. 58–63]

IV. The Normal Mercator Projection [pp. 64–79]

1850–1889

1890–1909

1910–1939

1940–1950

Summary

V. Equal-Area and Compromise Projections [pp. 80–133]

1850–1889

1890–1909

1910–1939

1940–1950

Summary

VI. Star and Butterfly Projections [pp. 134–48]

General Characteristics

British and American Projections

Summary

VII. Radio and Air Age Projections [pp. 148–79]

Classification

The Nineteenth Century

1890–1909

1910–1939

1940–1950

Summary

VIII. The Future of the World Map [pp. 180–98]

Criteria of Survival

Application to Specific Projections

Appendices [pp. 199–218]

A. Points of Mathematical Interest

B. Atlas Distribution Maps: Some Suggestions

Bibliography of Primary Sources [pp. 219–48]

Bibliography of Secondary Sources [pp. 249–61]

Key to Code Letters [to classification of world maps] [p. 262]

So was it what I thought it would be? Yes, and no!!

It is indeed an overview of the usage of different map projections for world maps in British and American atlases, wall maps, textbooks, and academic journals in the century from 1850 to 1950. In this respect it is a singular work, quite different from the established literature on the history of map projections that has emphasized the creation and mathematics of each new projection and has paid little attention to just how the projections were actually used and how that usage changed over time. (This criticism applies even to Snyder’s Flattening the Earth [1993].)

In this respect, Botley confirms my rough sense that Mercator’s projection was steadily challenged after 1850, but he added greater precision: the introduction of replacement projections came in two major phases, in 1890–1910 and then in 1940–50. He touched on and expanded my understanding of the concern for “global vision” ca. 1900 and then “air age” mapping after 1920. To the former he added an idea of concern for polar exploration making the earth fully known/explored/mapped; the latter he added the mapping of radio and telegraphic systems as well as aviation routes, and also the necessity of the USA to maintain long-distance sea and air routes to both the European and Asian theaters of war after 1941 that gave a pragmatic need for the US public to understand the nature of world maps. He made some borderline nationalistic comments about American willingness to throw existing maps out completely, without consideration of their positive uses, and to adopt new projections instead, although he did explain further that British publishers already used an array of world maps other than Mercator’s and needed to make less of an adjustment after 1940.

Yet Botley’s work is not what I need. He had the geographer’s concern for the propriety of projection usage. In this respect, he favored Mercator’s projection for maps of continuous phenomena, such as climatic variables or magnetism. The former could be shown on another continuous and conformal world map, such as the Gall Stereographic, and the latter needed to be on Mercator’s because of the relationship of magnetism to the determination of direction. That is, the historical information about trends in usage is interrupted by the imposition of his opinions about the appropriateness of the projection by contemporary standards. And Botley too paid less attention to the overall patterns of usage, so that that information tended to be lost in the welter of information about the development of new maps.

Moreover, Botley was interested far more in the projections and less in overall form of the maps. He does not make a clear distinction between the double-hemispheric and the cylindrical world maps, so it is hard to see their balance in. At the end, Botley gave a multiple-page table of the world maps in atlases and other texts, arranged in chronological order, but his data is relatively sparse and his coding of the maps is too imprecise to help my interest in teasing out fine patterns.

And, given the period when Botley was working, the thesis is understandably lacking or erroneous in much of its historical account.

So, a remarkable work, which helps my conceptualizing of trends in world mapping, but which does not help in detail. If I proceed with this larger project, then Botley’s study provides something of a base from which to work, if used carefully, and undoubtedly will help in thinking about how to pursue that further study.

In the meantime, my OCD brain is now spinning out ideas about how to design a database to collect the necessary information about the journals, books, atlases, and wall-maps, the form and projections and subject matter of each world map projection, the technical details of aspect (normal, transverse, oblique [and how]), national variation, and publishers, etc., and how that data might be collected and ultimately visualized to see all the variations and shifting patterns of usage.

Let me know if you have any opinions!

Notes

n1. I don’t now remember how I encountered a reference to Botley’s MA thesis. It might have been because I keep up with the literature that cites the work of Harley and Woodward via Web of Science, in the course of which I was led to an essay on the history of azimuthal map projections that began with the statement that

“The historical aspects of the development of mathematical cartography and the theory of map projections, as the main constituent have been considered in scientific papers by F. V. Botley, J. Brian Harley, David Woodward, Arthur H. Robinson, Joel L. Morrison, A. Jon Kimerling, Phillip C. Muehrcke, Stephen C. Guptill, Eberhard Schröder and Waldo R. Tobler” (Sossa and Korol 2015, 187).

This represents the kind of grab-bag of literature that I find indicative of an opportunistic list of citations rather than the result of a careful search and examination of the literature: a 1952 MA thesis; vols 1 and 2 of The History of Cartography; the last (1995) edition of the standard manual of map design, Elements of Cartography; a 1988 manual of the mathematics and history of map projections; and a “classic” essay on the “projections” of medieval maps (Tobler 1966). They also cited Snyder’s (1993) history of map projections. In this context, Botley’s MA thesis stands out like a sore thumb! Not widely known, does it actually deserve to be identified in the same sentence as these other, varied works?

n2. Gall had described three projections in 1855 and 1885: his Isographic, being a simple rectangular projection like the Plate Carée or Marinos projections; his Orthographic, a secant-cylindrical equal-area projection, that was unused until it was reinvented/resurrected by Arno Peters after World War II; and his Stereographic, a conformal cylindrical projection that was used in lieu of Mercator’s by Bartholomew and other British publishers.

References

Botley, F. V. 1949. “A Tetrahedral Gnomonic Projection.” Geography 34, no. 3: 131–36.

———. 1951a. “A Globe Segment.” Geography 36, no. 3: 193–98.

———. 1951b. “A New Approach to World Distribution Maps.” Geographical Journal 117, no. 2: 215–17.

———. 1951c. “A New Use for the Plate Carrée Projection.” Geographical Review 41, no. 4: 640–44.

Cahill, Bernard J. S. 1909. “An Account of a New Land Map of the World.” Scottish Geographical Magazine 25, no. 9: 449–69.

Dahlberg, Richard E. 1962. “Evolution of Interrupted Map Projections.” Internationales Jahrbuch für Kartographie 2: 36–54.

Pędzich, Paweł. 2016. “Image of the World on Polyhedral Maps and Globes.” Polish Cartographical Review 48, no. 4: 197–210.

Snyder, John P. 1993. Flattening the Earth: Two Thousand Years of Map Projections. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Snyder, John P., and Harry Steward. 1988. Bibliography of Map Projections. U.S. Geologial Survey, Bulletin 1856. Washington, DC: GPO.

Sossa, Rostislav, and Pavel Korol. 2015. “Historical Aspects of Development of the Theory of Azimuthal Map Projections.” Studia Geohistorica 3: 187–203.

Tobler, Waldo R. 1966. “Medieval Distortions: The Projections of Ancient Maps.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 56, no. 2: 351–60.