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Gerardus Mercator was a geographer, cartographer and mathematician born in Flanders. He is best known for a new mapping technique that bears his name, the Mercator projection. The quality of his maps made them a copy source for generations of mapmakers.
In 1552 Gerardius Mercator moved to Duisburg to evade religious persecution. In 1554 he produced a map of six panels of Europe. In 1568 Mercator used a new way of displaying a map with 90 degree parallel lines for the latitudes and meridians. This new technique was actually not invented by Mercator. But he was the first cartographer to apply it. The Mercator projection was a great progress for navigation on sea. Its disadvantage is the disproportion of size. The closer the area towards the poles, the larger it is in size. Greenland for instance is shown 16 times larges than in reality.
Mercator's main work, a three volume world atlas, was published in several editions from 1585 on and beyond his death in 1594. Mercator then was the first to use the word atlas. In 1604 another famous cartographer, Jodocus Hondius had acquired Mercator's original plates and published several more editions. The subsequent generation of mapmakers more or less copied from Mercator's world atlas.
Mercator had studied geography, cartography and mathematics at the University of Louvain in Belgium. He published his first map in 1537. Later he invented and introduced today's way of displaying a map with 90 degree parallel lines for the latitudes and meridians. |