Time Line
1609
Galileo discovers satellites orbiting Jupiter and the concept of an Earth - centred universe with all objects revolving around the earth. He made careful observations and measurments and recorded them in detailed descriptions and drawings.
1613
The Indian Marine is formed by the British.
1669
Jean Picard measures a degree of latitude on the meridian of Paris and later in the century Giovanni Cassini and his son Jacques continue to measure this meridian within France, and find that the length of a degree of latitude appears to diminish northward, suggesting that the earth was prolate, or flattened at the equator.
1675
The Royal Observatory at Greenwitch is established as a Centre for Astronomical Research to improve navigation techniques.
1686
On its change of base from Surat to Bombay (present Mumbai), the Indian Marine takes the name ‘The Bombay Marine’.
1687
Sir Isaac Newton, in his ‘Principia Mathematica’, demonstrates as a corollary to his theory of gravitation that the earth is in fact flattened at the poles.
|
|
Theatrum of Ortelius
In the 17th century, among all the 41 editions of the atlas ‘Theatrum’ of Ortelius, the last one was published in 1612. In addition to the 21 Latin editions, there were two Dutch editions, five German, six French, four Spanish, two Italian and one English (1606). Gerritsz engraved and published several charts as the draughtsman of a magnificent manuscript map of the Pacific Ocean, is one of them ‘Caert van’t landt Eendracht’ was published in 1627 that portrayed the coast of western Australia discovered by the Dutch vessel, Eendracht. At the end of the 17th century, the reformation of cartography began with the longitude measurements of the French Academy. There were successive stages in the making of the new map of France, such as the measurement of an arc of the meridian of Paris by the Abbe Picard, in 1669-’70, by means of a chain of triangles, the first attempt to produce a new map of France by adjusting existing surveys, supplemented by observations for latitude and longitude, to the Paris meridian and planned survey of the whole country. Following the establishment of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich as a centre for astronomical research to improve navigation techniques, English maps began to use Greenwich as their prime meridian - a fixed point from which longitude was measured. In this period of time, the gap between popular and scientific geography was narrowed. New surveys were made and new maps drawn by cartographers who were also accomplished astronomers like the Cassini family in France, or scholars like d’Anville, or marine hydrographers like J. N. Bellin, Captain Cook and Murdock Mackenzee.
In India, mapping during the early 17th century focused much on the polity of the Mughal Empire. Those maps emphasised the seat of Mughal power in the northern plains and showed the Mughal territories west of the Indus, especially Punjab, the Hindu Kush, and occasionally Afghanistan, but the peninsula was omitted. The southward expansion of Mughal power under Aurangazeb (reigned 1658- 1707) in the late 17th century led to the merging of the two regional framings in the early 18th century; the European cartographers extended their maps of the empire to incorporate the peninsula.
|
|