Can you give me a brief history on the origins of latitude, longitude and the division of degrees into minute and seconds. How old is this system and who developed it?Thank you for a very interesting question. Although I have been involved with latitude and longitude map transformations for some time, I never spent much time studying the history of the coordinate system. I was aware that the use of 60 unit divisions (minutes and seconds) came from the time of the Phoenicians, and kept being used because the number 60 could be divided evenly into many different parts. I was also aware that ancient Greek philosophers had measured the circumference of the Earth, using a method that essentially consisted of measuring the latitude of two points and measuring the distance between them, and that the figure they got for the diameter of the Earth was much more accurate than the diameter Christopher Columbus used when he later planned his voyage to the Indies. A brief search on the internet turned up the following link http://www.studyworksonline.com/cda/content/article/0,,EXP118_NAV2-5_SAR121,00.shtml which gives a much more complete history of the ancient Greek explorations at sea and their development of maps with latitude and longitude lines. Albion D. Taylor |
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