Maps

[Coldfusion]

How in the old days before flight, when they made maps how were they able to know what shape the countries were?

[darth vader]

good question. many answers, but one way was to simply sail round and plot the contours of the land. then a bit of simple distance measuring (on land) between the three points of a triangle and some trigonometry (maths) calculations to work out how far the land juts out. Obviously they never got it quite right - see some early (1300's for example) maps of UK to see a shortened, fattened british isles!

[Coldfusion]

Wow. Thanks That must have been a painstakingly long job!

[tomd]

http://tinyurl.com/3d83c

[darth vader]

They didn't have much to do in those days what with no TV, radio, music players, computers etc.... and charting a map for 5 years was a walk in the park for them

[darth vader]

Look what the egyptians did when they got bored!

[bernardo]

Triangulation

[Britannia]

Many early maps were based on observations made by the great explorers, such as Christopher Columbus and Captain Cook, who were cartographers as well as sailors and navigators. This site explains in a bit more detail how it was done. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/explorers/h24-230-
e.html Things haven't changed much these days either ... we poor surveyors are always being sent to outlandish places where there are no mod cons... like Wolverhampton!! ;) Luckily the technology has improved, though, so it no longer takes 5 years! Incidentally, many large scale surveys are now done using GPS instead of aerial photography.

[IanPat]

Or maybe they stole them ,like Cook and Columbus did

[Myusername]

One French king (sorry, I don't remember which one) famously complained that he had lost more territory to cartographers than he had in all his wars.