Abraham Ortelius published the world's first atlas on this day in 1570.
GoogleToday's Google Doodle celebrates the publication of the world's first atlas in 1570. Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, or Theatre of the World, was a novel concept in the late 16th century: a book of maps, all the same size, organized geographically.
It was the work of cartographer Abraham Ortelius, who collected the maps, added his own notes, and had the book printed from specially-engraved copper plates. It contains one of the earliest allusions to what would later become the theory of continental drift, and it's full of the names of the leading scientists and cartographers of the late sixteenth century - people like Gerardus Mercator, whose method of representing the round globe on a flat map is still in use today. Ortelius did almost none of the actual surveying or drawing for the maps in his book; his role was to bring them all together with descriptions and references. So he cited the names of the 33 cartographers whose work he used - another first, in a period when rules about plagiarism would horrify most college professors today. He also included a list of 54 more professional cartographers.
The 53 maps in the atlas represented everything western Europeans in 1570 knew about the shape of the world. Of course, there was a lot that western Europeans in 1570 didn't know about the shape of the world - starting with Australia and Antarctica. Europeans wouldn't stumble across Australia until 30 years after Ortelius published his first edition, and it would take another two hundred years for James Cook to discover Antarctica. But Ortelius' maps do depict Terra Australis, a hypothetical southern continent located about where Antarctica turned out to be.
And Oretlius' work made for a much more lively reference than modern atlases. Sea monsters populated the woodcut seas, and symbolic female characters introduced each of the five known continents, led by a quaintly ethnocentric depiction of Europe as the queen of them all.
A 1573 edition is available online from the State Library of New South Wales, Australia (which isn't in the atlas).
