Mercator

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

(1) An orthomorphic map projection in which meridians appear at right-angles to the equator, and lines of latitude are horizontal lines, the distance between the two increasing as the distance from the equator grows (ie the opposite of physical reality on spherical planet Earth.

(2) Noting, pertaining to, or according to the principles of a Mercator projection, used for maps & charts.

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 de Kremer until his adoption of the Latinized form which translates as “merchant” (listed by dictionaries also as “dealer, trader, dealer, speculator etc”).  In 1585 he began work on a book of maps of Europe, a project later completed by his son Rumold Mercator (1541–1599) 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.  Mercator is a noun; the noun plural is mercators.

A Mercator-projection map (left), one of the many alternative projections (centre) and an overlay (right) with the Mercator–derived land sizes (light blue) relative to true physical geography (dark blue).

The Mercator projection was developed in 1568 by Gerardus Mercator as a navigation tool with (more-or-less) spherical planet Earth depicted on a flat rectangular grid with parallel lines of latitude and longitude.  Its functionality was that, used as nautical charts, it allowed seafarers to follow the appropriate line of latitude or longitude as a navigation guide.  In the West, it soon became a standard for Admiralty maps & charts and such was the volume of production that it the Mercator emerged also as the de facto standard in educational and other civilian uses, cartographers and publishers attracted by the economics of a single basic template for all purpose.  However, the Mercator projection is a most imprecise representation of the relative sizes of land masses because the technique increasingly distorts the size of the shapes as the distance from the Equator increases to the poles at which point the scale becomes infinite.  That’s why the size of a northerly masse (such as Greenland) appears much larger than truly it is, relative to an equatorial area (such as central Africa).

Rendered by Vovsoft as cartoon character: a brunette Lindsay Lohan pointing to the exaggerated size of Greenland when rendered with the Mercator projection.

In the twentieth century, that distortion attracted criticism on the grounds the projection increased the size of the countries of the European colonial powers while reducing those of 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 difficult accurately to depict the surface of a sphere on a two-dimensional rectangular space (the so-called “orange-segment” (these use various interpretations of the eumorphic (preservation of original shape) technique) maps are less prone to compressing or exaggerating relativities but are harder to read for non-experts; ).  Over the centuries, cartographers have created literally dozens of projection systems (some variants of existing types), tied sometimes to specific uses in fields including aviation, military planning and satellite imaging.  Conceptually, a Mercator map is similar to the famous “map” of the London Underground: a thing perfect for navigation and certainly indicative but not to exact scale.  Most modern atlases generally no longer use the Mercator projection (except for historical or artistic illustrations) but it remains popular for wall-maps.