Week 19 History Essay

           In Week 19, I learned about the Mercator projection map, Mercator, Tycho Brahe, and the backstaff. The Mercator projection map was invented by Gerardus Mercator in 1569. Mercator was a geographer and a mapmaker who believed that Aristotle was nonsense. He invented the Mercator projection map, which was a cylindrical map projection. The angles on the map matched the angles on a compass, so it made navigation on the water much easier for sailors. Next was Tycho Brahe, who was born in Sweden in the 1500s. He helped Copernicus with developing heliocentric theory, which I learned about last week. Last came the backstaff, which is a nautical instrument used to determine the altitude of a celestial body, like the sun or the moon. It was invented by the English navigator John Davis. None of these inventions are used today, because we have better technology for navigation. But we wouldn’t have better technology if it weren’t for these people and inventions a long time ago. My favorite thing I learned about this week was the backstaff. I thought it was cool that they could measure how far the sun was from the earth based on its shadow.