thomas_roberts•5d agoProlific Poster

Tip: Check the scale before you trust a map's border drawing

Ngl, I was looking at a 1940s map of Africa last week and noticed the borders looked super clean and straight. Turns out the scale was way off compared to modern maps, so countries like Sudan looked tiny and totally different shaped. I had to cross-reference three other maps from different years to figure out the real boundaries. Anyone else run into maps that are just flat out wrong on proportions?

2 comments

2 Comments

lucas4984d ago

See, that topographic survey argument makes sense on paper but I found the opposite in practice. I was checking an old map of the Congo from the 1920s against a modern satellite image and the lat/long grid marks were actually drawn with less accuracy than the mapmaker's own hand-drawn borders. The grid itself was slightly rotated compared to modern coordinates, so using it as a baseline just threw everything off more. A plain old 1950s road map of the region ended up being more reliable because the cartographers had better ground surveys to work from. Bottom line, old map scales can be misleading but the grid marks aren't a magic fix either. You really gotta look at the whole context and maybe even the mapmaker's original notes if you can find them.

lisa_grant5d ago

Old maps are wild honestly. My buddy pulled out a 1908 atlas of Europe once and the scale was so bad that Austria-Hungary looked like it stretched halfway to Asia. Cross referencing with a 1950s map and a modern one showed the borders were actually way more jagged and broken up than the original drawing let on. What really helped me was finding a topographic survey from the same era with lat/long grid marks printed on it. That let me check the proportions against a known baseline, like comparing the distance between two major river mouths. Without that grid, you're basically guessing at how accurate the old mapmaker was feeling that day.