Journey through Time

Anaximander is credited as having made one of the first ______ of the world.

Eratosthenes measured the angle the sunlight hit a well in Alexandria at the same time Syene was under the subsolar point, and using geometry measured the rough ______ of the Earth, and got it almost entirely right.

Eratosthenes then decided to ______ it out, or at least all the parts known to his civilization.

Ptolemy used this system of ______ and meridians to place cities and well-known areas at certain points of the globe, using data compiled from around the Roman Empire to determine a place’s latitude and longitude.

Figuring out your latitude is actually quite ______. If you’re in the northern hemisphere (as these famous cartographers generally were) the star Polaris-- known as the “north star”-- could be used to determine how far you were from the North Pole.

Quite a few tools had been invented to help determine one’s ______, including the astrolabe, sextant, quadrant, theodolite, or whatever else you have to spot stars and measure angles.

Figuring out your ______ however is a lot harder, because the Earth… spins… meaning a constellation directly to your east will be directly to your west after only a few hours without you even moving, giving you no fixed reference points for east or west.

Ptolemy defined the Prime ______ as the Fortune Isles, then the westernmost point of land known to the Roman Empire, though with no good method of measuring longitude other than how long the roads between different cities were (and the angles they would have taken), the shape of the known world might have been alright, but he vastly overestimated how wide the world was.

Before the invention of satellites, ancient civilizations used various instruments such as the astrolabe and sextant to determine their ________.

To determine latitude, ancient cartographers in the northern hemisphere relied on the ________, also known as the 'north star'.

Unlike latitude, determining ________ was more challenging due to the Earth's rotation, which caused constellations to move across the sky.

The refracting telescope was invented in ______ and the pendulum clock in ______, though the latter saw little use at sea because ships also move side-to-side, though these provided huge advantages over dead reckoning.

The Greeks and Romans obviously weren’t alone to the party either, the Arabs and Chinese also made their own ______ maps (the former even preserving many of the Greek texts we talked about here), and the Polynesians used maps made of sticks and seashells, with the shells representing different islands and the sticks bent and shaped in certain ways to show how the winds and waves flowed.

Now it’s no secret, the precise details on these maps were incredibly inaccurate, but here’s the thing, before maybe the 17th century, maps were often times more ______ than specific. Back then it was mostly whatever says goes.

I mean knowing Italy is curved like this and not like this isn’t necessarily as important as making sure you know you’re heading towards the right part ______. Don’t get me wrong though, those super-oversimplified medieval T-and-O maps are a sin.