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Informationen zum Autor John Noble Wilford is a science correspondent for The New York Times. He has won two Pulitzer Prizes—one in 1984 for his reporting on space science, and the other in 1987 as a member of the Times team reporting on the aftermath of the Challenger accident. He was the McGraw Lecturer at Princeton University in 1985, and Professor of Science Journalism at the University of Tennessee in 1989-90. In 1998, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He lives in New York. Klappentext In his classic text! two-time Pulitzer Prize--winner John Noble Wilford recounts the history of cartography from antiquity to the space age. With this revised edition! Wilford brings the story up to the present day! as he shows the impact of new technologies that make it possible for cartographers to go where no one has been before! from the deepest reaches of the universe (where astronomers are mapping time as well as space) to the inside of the human brain. These modern-day mapmakers join the many earlier adventurers-including ancient Greek stargazers! Renaissance seafarers! and the explorers who mapped the American West-whose exploits shape this dramatic story of human inventiveness and limitless curiosity." " Leseprobe Chapter 1 The Map Idea The origin of the map is lost to history. No one knows when or where or for what purpose someone got the first idea to draw a sketch to communicate a sense of place, some sense of here in relation to there. It must have been many millennia ago, probably before written language. It certainly was long before the human mind could conceive of the worlds beyond shore and horizon, beyond Earth itself, that would be embraced through mapping. All the evidence suggests that the map evolved independently among many peoples in many separate parts of Earth. Before Europeans reached the Pacific, the Marshall Islanders were making stick charts. Sticks were lashed together with fibers to depict prevailing winds and wave patterns; shells or coral were inserted at the appropriate places to represent islands. The smaller stick charts were carried by the islanders in their outrigger canoes, while the larger ones were kept on land for instruction. When a Tahitian communicated his knowledge of South Pacific geography to Captain Cook by drawing a map, it was clear that he and his people were quite familiar with the map idea. Pre-Columbian maps in Mexico indicated roads by lines of footprints. Cortés traveled through Central America guided by a calico map provided by a local cacique. It has also been discovered that centuries ago Eskimos carved accurate coastal maps in ivory, the Incas built elaborate relief maps of stone and clay, and early Europeans drew sketch maps on their cave walls. One of antiquity's great civilizations, China, fully grasped the map idea thousands of years ago. Most of our knowledge of this comes not from any extant maps, all of which are of more recent vintage, but indirectly through references in Chinese documents. A town-building prospectus submitted to the emperor in 1020 b.c. mentions an illustrative map, now lost. The Zhou dynasty in the immediately succeeding centuries had a standing order that each principality be mapped, and a royal geographer always accompanied the emperor on his tours of the realm. Maps, it seems, had already become instruments of bureaucracy and political power. The oldest extant Chinese map came to the attention of scholars in the 1990s. Examining artifacts excavated two decades earlier in Hebei province, scientists discovered a large bronze plate engraved with the Zhao Yu Tu ("map of the area of the mausoleum"). The map, dated to the fourth century b.c., marked locations of buildings in the five mausoleums of Emperor Wang Cuo, his empress, and his concubines. Historians of cartography were impressed by the map as evidence of rather advan...
