History of Cartography - Modern Cartography

Modern Cartography

The Vertical Perspective projection was first used by the German map publisher Matthias Seutter in 1740. He placed his observer at ~12,750 km distance. This is the type of projection used today by Google Earth.

The final form of the equidistant conic projection was constructed by the French astronomer Joseph-Nicolas Delisle in 1745.

The Swiss mathematician Johann Lambert invented several hemisperic map projections. In 1772 he created the Lambert conformal conic and Lambert azimuthal equal-area projections.

The Albers equal-area conic projection features no distortion along standard parallels. It was invented by Heinrich Albers in 1805.

In the United States in the 17th and 18th centuries, explorers mapped trails and army engineers surveyed government lands. Two agencies were established to provide more detailed, large-scale mapping. They were the U.S. Geological Survey and the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey (now the National Geodetic Survey under the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association).

The Greenwich prime meridian became the international standard reference for cartographers in 1884.

During the 20th century, maps became more abundant due to improvements in printing and photography that made production cheaper and easier. Airplanes made it possible to photograph large areas at a time.

Two-Point Equidistant projection was first drawn up by Hans Maurer in 1919. In this projection the distance from any point on the map to either of the two regulating points is accurate.

The loximuthal projection was constructed by Karl Siemon in 1935 and refined by Waldo Tobler in 1966.

Since the mid-1990s, the use of computers in mapmaking has helped to store, sort, and arrange data for mapping in order to create map projections.