The Mapmakers: Revised Edition-Quality Guarantee

Description

In his classic text, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner John Noble Wilford recounts thehistory of cartography from antiquity to the space age.

They are among the world’s great pioneers and adventurers: the mapmakers who for centuries have been expanding our knowledge of who and where we are, and where we want to go. From the surprisingly accurate silk maps prepared by Chinese cartographers in the second century B.C., to medieval mapmakers who believed they had fixed the location of paradise, through to the expeditions of Columbus and Magellan, John Noble Wilford chronicles the exploits of the great pioneers of mapmaking. Wilford brings the story up to the present day as he shows the impact of new technologiesthat make it possible for cartographers to go where no one has been before, fromthe deepest reaches of the universe (where astronomers are mapping time as well asspace) to the inside of the human brain. These modern-day mapmakers join the manyearlier adventurers—including ancient Greek stargazers, Renaissance seafarers, andthe explorers who mapped the American West—whose achievements shape this dramatic storyof human inventiveness and limitless curiosity.