I heard (at school I think) that official world maps had Europe enlarged compared to the rest of the world.
Is this true? And if so are they still in use?
I think (do not know) that this is merely a side effect of map making.
There are a number of ways to make a map and each has its advantages and drawbacks. Usually the need for which it is being created is what drives the need to make it one way or another.
A Mercator Projection is a very common map type but one of its main drawbacks is size distortion.
Look at the link I just gave and look at Greenland. It looks bigger than the United States when in fact it is much smaller. This is due to the distortion brought on by taking the converging longitude lines and straightening them out. Items by the equator are sized correctly but the farther north or south you go the worse the distortion gets.
That said it may be that map makers somewhere intentionally skewed the size of their countries to make a king happy or something but I do not know one way or the other.
It’s not just Europe, but a general distortion away from the equatorial line on standard Mercator-projection maps. It wasn’t intended to intentionally distort Europe - rather it was just an artifact of trying to build a practical flat navigational map. This explanation lays it out simply enough:
http://www.diversophy.com/petersmap.htm
- Tamerlane
Below is a link to a more clear Mercator map. You can see easily that Greenland is monstrous and Antarctica is just ridiculously huge.
This sounds like an UL but there may be a grain of truth under what you hear that possibly doesn’t make it completely untrue, just very misleading.
The earth is more or less a sphere. You cannot project it onto a flat piece of paper without distorting it. Some projections do a better job than others but all do it to some extent. In some maps regions to the extreme north or south appear much bigger than they are compared to placed nearer the equator. If you know how to read a map you can see how the meridian lines are distorted. In many maps Greenland may look much wider than it actually is but you’ll notice that meridian lines don’t converge as they approach the north pole as they would on a globe. Europe is far enough north that this might be the case. In any case I’m certain there are no official maps that show Europe being larger than it is to a person who understrands projections.
I understand the distortion when making maps in certain ways. However the person who told me this implied that it was a deliberate oversizing of just Europe, on top of the incedental distortion effect.
It’s worth noting the common perception that America and Europe are basically horizontal…in fact, London is north of most of the US, and Europe is basically parallel to Canada. It’s only ocean-based climate patterns that keep us warm.
The relevance of this to the OP is that in the maps being discussed, Europe in general is likely to be enlarged, unlike the US.
I’ve never heard of that but that is hardly evidence of anything except perhaps my own ignorance.
It should be said that an intentionally skewed map as you describe is a pretty useless map. Unless it was meant as artwork for some king’s study or something I can’t imagine why anyone would be bothered to do that. It’d be like taking a picture of your house and neighboring houses and using Photoshop to enlarge just your house so it looks bigger than the neighbor’s houses. Might make you feel good to fool yourself that you have the biggest house on the block but serves no practical purpose.
I can’t think of any particular propjection that would be used to deliberately oversize just Europe - unless it were a map that was Europecentric (centered on the map) and didn’t portray any other continent.
Hmm - on second thought; Maybe your friend was refering to a cartogram where features are sometimes distorted for visual effect.
See the following link for an example of a cartogram:
http://www.geog.ucsb.edu/~sara/html/mapping/election/guardian_carto.gif
If it were a cartogram, then it’s quite possible that Europe may have been larger than the other continents. A cartogram really isn’t a map in a true cartographic sense.
They probably got their information from websites or persons seeking to establish the Peter’s Projection of the world. Although untrue that Mercator maps only distort Europe (to make it larger), they do make the Northern Hemisphere seem much larger in proportion to the Southern Hemisphere. Also, in most Mercator maps Antartica is chopped off, so it seems as if the Northern Hemisphere is much larger than the Southern. Additionally most Mercator maps available, until recently, were centered on longitude 0 (Greenwich) and therefore Europe was at the center and larger than it really is. This may be what led your friend to think that it is all a conspiracy, when it really is just a product of history (maps being necessary for naval empires, for which the Mercator projection is excellent, and naval empires (colonialism) being very European until recently).
A map which excessively magnified Europe specifically would not only be less useful, it’d be much more difficult to make. With most map projections, you can lay out a nice grid of latitude and longitude, which will probably be straight lines, and which will almost certainly be determined by some nice simple mathematical relations. Then, you can just plot out points by their latitude and longitude, and when you have all your points plotted, you’ll have a map. But if you go and try to magnify a specific region, more than other places at the same latitude, you’re going to have some really weird distortions in your grid, which probably won’t follow any simple form.
Also, on the Mercator projection, Antarctica is not merely huge, it’s infinite. If you had a Mercator map a meter wide, and wanted to show a point on the map a kilometer from the South Pole, that point would have to be 40 kilometers from the Equator on your map. Which wouldn’t exactly fit well into a classroom.
Another cite:
Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion map
Includes several reasons why it is claimed to be a ‘better’ map than either the Mercator or Peters projections.
In Mercator’s projection, everything which is not on the equator is enlarged relative to the equator. This is true - equally true - both north and south o fthe equator. The further the object is from the equator, the more it is enlarged.
The US is enlarged relative to the equator, therefore, and relative to objects which are closer to the equator than the US is. It is just not enlarged to the same degree as Europe is. Antartica and the Arctic Ocean are the most enlarged objects of all.
From the link: The Dymaxion map does not perpetuate the cultural bias that is part of all other world map projections. The cultural and economic ‘north/south’ divide is reinforced by the north-up-superior/south-down-inferior presentation of all other world maps
I’ve seen this once or twice on other maps as well. Does anyone actually argue that this is true? Not to get the thread into GD territory, but a claim of cultural bias and north-up-superior/south-down-inferior sounds like BS to me.
Not too much more difficult Simply imagine a Mercator projection with the “North Pole” inside of Europe. On such a projection Europe (and it’s antipode in the Pacific) would be infinite in size. So imagine such a map with the “North Pole” somewhere in the Atlantic near Europe. Europe woule be extremely large as would the Anitopde still in the Pacific. The normal lines of latitude and longitude would be curves of course.
Of course it’s true! 
Everyone knows that the real “up” direction is south.
I’ve only ever lived north of Latitude 37 degrees North, but can see why the closer-to-the equator-dwellers could feel cheated by Mercator, and why Southern-Hemispherites could feel cheated by the default “North-is-up” world view.
Having said that, it seems to me that the Dymaxion map, although Bucky F. may have intended it to have no “right way up”, is just as guilty of geographic bias as any. Just look at it: the Northern Hemisphere is almost intact, whereas the Southern Hemisphere is marginalized. Australia and Antarctica may as well be on separate planets (it looks as though you have to go via Asia, Europe, North America and South America to get from one to the other). Sure, when it’s in its cuboctahedral form these arguments don’t apply, but they don’t apply to a globe either.
So, whereas I can appreciate the “equal-area” qualities of the Dymaxion map, IMHO it fails in its attempt to defeat geographic bias.
But take a look at the last bullet point:
So the Bucky map can give you different perpsectives on the world; it’s not confined to the example on this particular web page.