Category Archives: history

Illustrating map projection distortions with the outline of a human head

Browsing archive.org I came across the beautiful figures in Elements of map projection with applications to map and chart construction by Charles Henry Deetz and Oscar Sherman Adams from 1921. While thumbing through it is worthwhile in any case if you like cartography, one page surprised me with illustrations of relative distortions in map projections. They used the outline of a human head to show the distortion of globular, orthographic, stereographic and Mercator projection.

illustrations of relative distortions

It might be a fun project to make a website where random images could be distorted to various projections. mercator.me is taken.