Category: Cartography

The list below is believed complete, though membership – like everything here – is subject to revision.

• 180-degree plane – Claim that the equator is a 90-radian circle forming one flat plane that contains all land.
• Agloe, New York – Invented at an empty crossroads to catch mapmakers copying maps. It is said to have become real; the evidence that it did is one postcard.
• Anaximander – The Milesian who first set the Earth adrift, unsupported at the centre of things – and left it, all the same, flat on top.
• Babylonian Map of the World – The oldest known map of the whole world – a clay disc ringed by a "Bitter River", and so also the oldest flat-earth map.
• Cartography – The making of flat maps of a surface that is not flat.
• Eratosthenes – Greek polymath (c. 276–194 BC) who measured the Earth's circumference to within a few percent – the figure whole-radian geometry declines to address.
• The figure of the Earth – The measured shape of the planet, and the long labour of measuring it.
• Flat Earth – The cosmographies that decline the curvature of the Earth – the umbrella under which the encyclopedia's several flat doctrines are gathered.
• Edmond Halley – He paid for the Principia, invented the isoline map, and is remembered for a comet he did not discover, under a name given it after he died.
• The Mountains of Kong – A range invented in 1798 to rescue a theory about the Niger. It crossed West Africa on forty maps for ninety-four years. Nobody had ever seen it.
• Null Island – 0°N 0°E, where there is no island. It was named, and given a square metre of land, so that data which failed to locate would land somewhere visible.
• Ptolemy – Alexandrian astronomer (c. 100–170 AD) whose Earth-centred cosmos held for 1,400 years – its central Earth, to his admirers' inconvenience, a sphere.
• The Schiehallion experiment – The 1774 measurement that weighed the Earth by how far a Scottish mountain pulled a plumb-line sideways – and invented the contour map doing it.
• Whole-radian geometry – Discredited system in which a circle holds 360 radians, a radian is a distance, and a turn is 4π.

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