4th of July Surprise

In 2010 I reported a Waldseemüller map that our Chancellor Angela Merkel donated to the Library of Congress. Martin Waldseemüller is the guy who made a map of the world and named the new continent in the west of the old world America.

Foto: AFP

Surprise: Today, on American Independence Day, the Badische Zeitung reported that two female scientists found a more miniature copy of Waldseemüller’s 500-year-old map in the Munich University Library hidden in a two-hundred-year-old book about geometry.

Their discovery presents the fifth copy of this so-called Globuskarte (globe map) printed around 1510. Its segments, when properly arranged, fold nicely into a sphere of 11 cm diameter.

The detail on the left shows a rather rudimentary form of North America, whereas the dimensions of South America were a little better known at the time of Waldseemüller. The mass of land in the south served as the place to print the name for the new continent: America.

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