The Mercator map was useful for navigation, particularly at sea. It's a conformal mapping so that an angle between two great circles on a globe would be the same as on a flat map. Great circles are the shortest distance between two points on a sphere, so one would like to sail a great circle route and likely have to cross meridians of longitude which are great circles as well. It wasn't a great technology, but it worked well enough.
The Mercator map was useful for navigation, particularly at sea. It's a conformal mapping so that an angle between two great circles on a globe would be the same as on a flat map. Great circles are the shortest distance between two points on a sphere, so one would like to sail a great circle route and likely have to cross meridians of longitude which are great circles as well. It wasn't a great technology, but it worked well enough.
https://substack.com/profile/275088212-flow/note/c-337861085?r=4js3f8&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action
Nice post. I wrote a dissimilar piece. Which you may find interesting.