Maps!
Secretly Incredibly Fascinating
00:00
The Mercator Map
On most Mercator maps, Greenland looks about as big as the entire continent of Africa. According to Syracuse University professor Mark Monmanier, Mercator's work was funded by various rich patrons and he made this map as one component of an attempt to document the whole history and cosmology of the world for a German Duke. The other reason this map is flawed is that Mercator was very distracted and not really a cartographer.
Transcript
Play full episode
