Setting the size of the grid squares doesn’t really answer the question. At what point could cartographers say “Well, there’s a 50 by 50 mile square there”? Well, always. Mapping doesn’t consist of just saying where the squares are; it means saying (to some level of detail) what features of interest are there (for some sort of features of interest).
It didn’t take very long at all after the discovery of Kansas to learn that there were no mountains there. It took much longer to determine where the oil was. Was Kansas fully mapped once they found the (lack of) mountains, or once they found the oil? That depends on whether you’re making a mountain map or an oil map.
True.
I think one benchmark could be: “has all land area of a country been mapped with the types of features, completeness, and accuracy one expects in a typical, standard 1:50,000 topographic map.” I’m not sure which country completed this task most recently, nor when this occurred. (Excepting Antarctica, which is a sort of world park belonging to no sovereign state).
It still depends on whose standard of “typical” you are using. Britain has been surveyed to an almost absurd degree of accuracy by the Ordnance Survey. Even on 1:50,000 maps the tiniest footpaths are shown. By contrast, in the US you can have 1:50,000 maps that omit entire villages.
They probably still do it today, but it’s hard to say. They intentionally keep that stuff secret until it comes out when they sue someone for copyright infringement.
This backfired in one case I know of. Agloe NY was a copyright trap in the Catskills on maps draw by General Drafting. Someone built a store at that point and found the name on an Esso road map. So they named the store Agloe General Store. The name was then added to the list of places kept by the county and Rand McNally got it from them. When General Drafting tried to sue, all this came out and their suit failed.
You’re right that GNIS has all kinds of places designated “populated place” that shouldn’t be labelled that, but I’m not sure that last factoid is really all that significant. There’s lots of places which people would unquestionably call a town, including incorporated places, that don’t have post offices.
Ordnance Survey type maps in most countries have the cadastral land survey [discrete parcels of public and private land] as one of their base layers. If someone - the govt or a private developer - has taken a large chunk of land and divided it into town lots for sale those are recorded, usually with any name given to it. Whether anyone ever bothered to buy them or a town flourished and then died, is really not their concern. Surviving buildings will be recorded as part of the ‘as is’ landscape capture at most scales.
Post offices were relevant when actual humans bought and occupied these lots, and getting your own post office, rather than having to ride 10 km to the existing town, was a subject of fierce lobbying.
“The coastline paradox is the counterintuitive observation that the coastline of a landmass does not have a well-defined length. This results from the fractal curve-like properties of coastlines…”
the Ordnance Survey is a fascinating subject and, as you might gather from the name, was originally done for military purposes after the Jacobite rising of 1745.
They were not the first maps of course, but the first *accurate *ones.
Years ago, someone in another thread (I don’t remember who) recommended the book Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings by Charles Hapgood. It’s an interesting book, although I don’t have a scientific opinion on it. Basically he asserts that there were ancient seafaring people who had traveled around the world, and who made maps that are referred to in historical documents.
Hapgood was a crank and whackjob who proposed that the Earth’s axis and the location of the poles had shifted multiple times, that there had been ice-free areas in Antarctica during the Ice Ages supporting advanced civilizations, and dinosaurs co-existing along with men and horned humans.
OK, that’s true, but I was mostly reacting to using post office names to estimate what the most common town name in the US was. One problem (but not the only one) with that is that post offices have a restriction that there can’t be more than one with a given name in each state.
But isn’t the term “false fact” the equivalent of a creative work?
If I say that Columbus is the capital of Ohio, I cannot copyright that because it is a fact and everyone “owns” that fact.
But if I say that modern grapes are distant relatives of olives once cross bred between ancient grapes and ancient olives by a scientist in 78 B.C.–why can’t I copyright that as it is not a fact and i just made it up. Why is that not a creative work? Obviously not the best creative work ever, but still.