Mercator

Mercator (pronounced mer-key-ter or mer-kah-tawr (Flemish))

Noting, pertaining to, or according to the principles of a Mercator projection, a type of cartographical projection used to render the spherical globe as a flat map.

1568: From the Latin Mercator (from mercor (trade or deal in goods)) from merx from the Proto-Italic merk, possibly from Etruscan, referring to various aspects of economics (and the source of the English merchant).  The map was named after Gerardus Mercator (1512-1594), a Flemish geographer and cartographer whose name was Gerhard Kremer until his adoption of the Latinized form which translates as "dealer” or “tradesman".  In 1585 he began work on a book of maps of Europe, a project later completed by his son and published in 1595.  On the book’s cover was a drawing of the titan Atlas (from Greek mythology) carrying the globe on his shoulders and the word atlas has since been applied to any book of maps.

The Mercator Map.

The Mercator projection was developed in 1568 by Gerardus Mercator as a navigation tool with spherical planet earth depicted on a flat rectangular grid with parallel lines of latitude and longitude.  Its functionality was such that in the west, it became the standard technique of projection for nautical navigation and the de facto standard for maps and charts.

Flat map rendered with actual dimensions.

However, the Mercator map is a most imprecise representation of the precise shapes and relative sizes of land masses because the projection distorts the size of objects as the latitude increases from the Equator to the poles, where scale becomes infinite.  That’s why land-masses such as Greenland and Antarctica appear much larger than they actually are, relative to equatorial areas such as central Africa.

Mercator v actual.

In the twentieth century, that distortion attracted criticism on the grounds the projection tended to increase the size of the land-masses of the European colonial powers while reducing those in the colonized south.  However, neither Gerardus Mercator nor cartographers had social or political axes to grind; the geographical distortion was an unintended consequence of what was designed as a navigational device and it's anyway impossible accurately to depict the surface of a sphere as a two-dimensional rectangle or square (the so-called "orange-segment" renditions are dimensionally most accurate but harder to read).  The Mercator map is no different from the map of the London Underground; a thing perfect for navigation and certainly indicative but not to exact scale.  Modern atlases generally no longer use the Mercator map (except for historical or artistic illustrations) but they’re still published as wall-maps.