You Could Look It Up (18 page)

Ortelius the cartographer did not go it alone. He benefited from Mercator’s friendship, and he made good use of all the best cartographers in Europe. Ortelius’s achievement was not producing original maps, but collecting the best and most up-to-date maps in one place and in one uniform edition. There had been world maps before, and of course there were countless maps of specific regions. No one, though,
had ever prepared a single printed source that collected maps, all in the same format, that covered the entire globe. Ortelius’s suite of fifty-three maps and accompanying explanatory text was published in Antwerp in May 1570, bearing the title
Theatrum orbis terrarum
(
Theater of the Globe of the World
).

The
Theatrum
offered what is now standard in every atlas but was then a novel way of organizing a collection of maps. It opened with a world map, then moves on to more detailed maps of the continents. Ortelius covered the old world of Europe, Africa, and Asia, and even included the latest information from the new world of North and South America, but he missed two entire continents—Australia and Antarctica would not be known to Europeans for generations. He also inexplicably threw in an extra one, occupying nearly the whole of the South Pacific, perhaps influenced by legends of the Incans. And his western coast of South America looks nothing like the real world. To his credit, though, Europeans had encountered North America just a few decades earlier, but Ortelius captured it, labeling it A
MERICA SIVE
I
NDIA
N
OVA
, with California depicted accurately as a peninsula.
5
Vast stretches of Africa and the Americas were blank, awaiting word from explorers, but the bigger story is how much Ortelius knew at that early period.

The reaction to the
Theatrum
was fast and overwhelmingly positive. As Mercator wrote to Ortelius on November 22, 1570:

I have examined your Theatrum and compliment you on the care and elegance with which you have embellished the labours of the authors, and the faithfulness with which you have preserved the production of each individual, which is essential in order to bring out the geographical truth, which is so corrupted by mapmakers… . You deserve great praise for having selected the best descriptions of each region and collected them into one manual, which can be bought at small cost, kept in a small space and even carried about wherever we please.
6

Mercator was not quite right about the “small cost.” The
Theatrum
was not cheap when it first came out, and subsequent editions—especially when they were hand-colored—became even more expensive.
One source even calls the hand-colored large-paper edition “the most expensive book of its time.”
7
Despite the expense, though, it was a hit, and both the success and the expense of the
Theatrum
led to imitators, such as Gerard de Jode’s
Hemispherium ab aequinoctiali linea, ad circulum poli arctici
(1578). But Ortelius was shrewd, keeping for himself the legal rights to the text, the images, and even the channels of distribution.
8
He issued revised versions of the
Theatrum
, dozens of editions that grew larger over time. The edition of 1612 had grown to 167 maps, with information from nearly two hundred documented sources and always the most
au courant
knowledge about the world. Translations of the text from the original Latin into Dutch, German, Italian, Spanish, French, and English followed quickly. Only in 1624 was the
Theatrum
overtaken by a more thorough and accurate atlas.

Ortelius produced what most scholars consider the first atlas, but the term was not his. Mercator first used the name of the ancient Greek Titan for his own book, based largely on Ortelius’s
Theatrum
: he called it
Atlas, sive cosmographicae meditationes de fabrica mundi
(
Atlas, or Cosmographic Meditations on the Structure of the World
, 1578). As Mercator put it, this collection of fifty-one maps was published “to honor the Titan King Atlas, King of Mauritania, a learned philosopher, mathematician and astronomer.”
9

Ortelius and Mercator were looking around, but some cartographers were busy looking up. “Space,” says that ever-reliable reference work
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
, “is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mindbogglingly big it is. I mean you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space.”
10

Astronomers are charged with dealing with that mind-boggling bigness. There had been many ancient efforts to map the heavens. Some interpreters view the dots on the cave walls at Lascaux from 16,500
B.C.E.
as a very early star chart. The Farnese Atlas, which may date from as early as the first century
B.C.E.
, is a sculpted white marble depiction of Atlas supporting the celestial sphere on his shoulder. It shows the constellations, though not the stars that make them up. A Roman
manuscript from the second century
C.E.
, the
Planisphere of Geruvigus
, maps the stars from an earthly point of view. Around the same time Claudius Ptolemy borrowed a star catalog from Hipparchus and depicted 1,022 stars gathered into forty-eight constellations. Ptolemy’s list became the canonical list for a millennium and a half. As late as 1536, a star chart by Peter Bienewitz—also known by the Latin form of his name, Petrus Apianus—showed Ptolemy’s forty-eight constellations and the stars that make them up.

“No greater problem is presented to the human mind,” said the pathbreaking Harvard astronomer Annie Jump Cannon, than classifying the stars.
11
To Johann Bayer, that problem was merely an encouragement. The German lawyer and astronomer is best known for
Uranometria
, which reduced the colossal amount of new information flooding in from observational astronomers to some systematic order. Bayer’s great atlas of the heavens was the first to try to catalog every star in the universe. It could not have come close to its stated goal, but it did make the work of subsequent astronomers like Galileo and Isaac Newton possible.

Little is known of Bayer’s life. He was born in Bavaria in 1572, and around the age of twenty he began his studies at the University of Ingolstadt, founded a century before and to this day one of the most prestigious universities in Europe. After Ingolstadt he moved to Augsburg, about eighty miles from his hometown, where he worked as a lawyer; there he developed an interest in astronomy, and particularly in
uranography
, the mapping of the stars and noting their relative magnitude (brightness).

When Bayer began his work, Ptolemy was still the unquestioned master, but new astronomical discoveries were forcing people to rethink conventional wisdom. Bayer did not need to start from scratch; he made use of Tycho Brahe’s catalog of just over a thousand stars. But he revised Tycho’s work, adjusting the magnitudes where Tycho got them wrong, and roughly doubling the length of the catalog. Bayer settled on the title
Uranometria: Omnium asterismorum continens schemata, nova methodo delineata, æreis laminis expressa
. The first word,
Uranometria
, was a neologism: it means “the measure of Uranus,” the father of Kronos and the grandfather of Zeus; this made him the Greek god of the heavens.
The subtitle explained what purchasers would find in the volume: “containing plans of all the stars, displayed in a new method, and engraved on copper.”

The fifty-one maps in
Uranometria
were designed by Bayer, based largely on the work of an earlier mapper of the stars, and engraved on copperplate by Alexander Mair.
12
Each of Ptolemy’s forty-eight constellations got its own map. Bayer took the classical constellations seriously, and he included beautiful illustrations of mythological figures supposedly represented in the stars, not mere stick figures. But while the maps were things of beauty, they were also prepared with great scientific care. Bayer superimposed his maps over a grid in what cartographers call trapezoidal projection and geocentric orientation, with the margins calibrated for each degree.
13
He was also the first European astronomer to offer a systematic account of the southern sky, and he added twelve constellations—Apis, Avis Indica, Chameleon, Dorado, Grus, Hydrus, Indus, Pavo, Phoenix, Piscis Volans, Toucan, and Triangulum Australe—to the ancient Ptolemaic list. The observations constitute a significant achievement, considering that Bayer was working in the age before telescopes were used in astronomy.

Bayer’s most lasting contribution, though, and one that outlasted his charts, was the system he worked out in
Uranometria
for naming stars—the first Western attempt to do so on a scientific basis. People
had been assigning names to stars since the earliest days of astronomy, but there was no rhyme or reason to the naming: the brightest star in the night sky was called Sopdet (“the sharp one”) by the ancient Egyptians and Sirius (“glowing”) by the Greeks; the sixth-brightest star, at the left foot of the constellation of Orion, was named Seba-en-Sah (“toe star”) by the Egyptians and Rigl Gawza al-Ysra (“left foot of the central one”) by the Arabians, a name picked up by the Romans as Rigel. The names were colorful but unsystematic, and as the list grew, the traditional names came to seem increasingly inadequate for serious astronomical work.

Bayer, though, gave each star a name that provided useful scientific information: a star’s name indicated the constellation in which it appeared and its relative brightness among all the stars in that constellation. He began each star’s name with a Greek letter, usually putting the brightest stars in each constellation near the beginning of the alphabet, and then specified the constellation (using the genitive case of the Latin name). What had long been known as Sirius, for instance, became, in Bayer’s system,
α
Canis Majoris, the brightest star in the constellation of Canis Major, the Great Dog. Rigel, one of the brighter stars in the constellation of Orion, became
β
Orionis (or
β
Ori for short). By the same logic,
α
Centauri, the star closest to our own sun, was the brightest in the constellation named for the Centaur.
14
(When the twenty-four letters of the Greek alphabet ran out in any given constellation, Bayer turned to the Latin alphabet, giving us star names like
d Centauri
and
G Scorpii
.)

Bayer’s
Uranometria
caught on, and it “set the standard for future celestial atlases due to its beauty and accuracy.”
15
After the first edition of 1603, later printings—with the charts, the accompanying text, or both—appeared in 1624 (twice), 1639, 1640, 1641, 1648, 1654, 1655, 1661, 1666, 1689, 1697, and 1723. Just as important, most of the new star catalogs of the early seventeenth century followed Bayer closely, spreading his work long beyond the era in which his own book was in print. Bayer’s work would not be superseded for more than a century: while the posthumous publication of John Flamsteed’s star atlas in 1729,
Atlas coelestis
, offered a more thorough catalog of the stars, even that is deeply indebted to Bayer’s
Uranometria
.