May 15: Mercator Bends the World Flat, L. Frank Baum Opens Oz, and Nylon Stockings Cause a Riot

🕐10 min read

Every time you look at a world map — the one on the classroom wall, the one on the news broadcast, the one in your head when someone says “Africa” — you are, almost certainly, looking at Gerardus Mercator’s work. He was born on May 15, 1512, and died in 1594, and the projection he devised in 1569 to help navigators sail straight lines across curved oceans has remained the default way most people visualize the world for 450 years, despite the fact that it wildly distorts the relative size of landmasses and places Europe at the center by design and necessity. Greenland appears to be roughly the same size as Africa. Africa is actually 14 times larger.

The Mercator projection is a beautiful piece of mathematics applied to a specific practical problem — and then applied everywhere else too, including places where it causes systematic distortions. That pattern — of a tool built for one purpose becoming a general assumption — is one of the quiet recurring themes of intellectual history, and Mercator’s birthday is a good occasion to notice it.

Mercator and the Useful Lie of the Flat Earth

Gerardus Mercator was born Geert de Kremer on May 15, 1512, in Rupelmonde, in what is now Belgium, the seventh child of a shoemaker. He took the Latinized name Mercator — “merchant” — in the humanist fashion of his era. He studied mathematics and geography at Leuven, became the leading cartographer of his generation, and in 1544 was arrested for heresy, accused of communicating with Lutherans. He was released after several months. The near-execution clarified his priorities. He moved to Duisburg, in the Duchy of Cleves, where he spent the rest of his life mapping the world.

His most important contribution — the 1569 world map with the projection that bears his name — solved a specific navigational problem. On a globe, lines of constant compass bearing (rhumb lines or loxodromes) are curves. If you’re navigating by compass at sea, you want to draw a straight line and follow it. The Mercator projection mathematically transforms the globe so that rhumb lines become straight lines. The trade-off is distortion: to keep compass bearings accurate, the projection must stretch the poles. At the poles, the distortion becomes infinite; Mercator’s maps don’t show the poles at all.

This is a perfectly acceptable trade-off for a sailor in 1569 who needs to navigate from Lisbon to the Azores. It is a peculiar basis for a classroom poster, but classroom posters followed, and the Mercator projection became the default representation of the world — not just for navigation, but for geopolitics, national identity, and ordinary mental furniture. The political implications are not subtle: a projection designed by a European cartographer for European navigators naturally places Europe at the center and inflates its apparent size. The Peters projection, proposed by Arno Peters in 1974 as a political corrective, preserves area at the expense of shape. Google Maps uses a modified Mercator for most of its display. The war between accuracy and convenience, in cartography as in everything else, remains unresolved.

Mercator also coined the word “atlas” for a collection of maps — naming his posthumously published collection after Atlas, the Titan who held up the sky. He was thinking of Atlas as a cosmological scholar, not as a sufferer under burden. The word stuck. Whether we are more like the bearer or the scholar depends on the day.

L. Frank Baum and the Country That Was Already There

Lyman Frank Baum was born on May 15, 1856, in Chittenango, New York, the seventh of nine children of a wealthy oil businessman. He grew up in comfort, worked variously as an actor, playwright, newspaper editor (he ran a newspaper in Aberdeen, South Dakota, whose editorial page published at least two columns calling for the extermination of Native Americans — a fact that sits badly alongside his later reputation as the gentle author of utopian children’s fiction), dry goods store owner, and traveling salesman before writing The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in 1900.

The book was an immediate success. It spawned 13 sequels written by Baum himself, dozens more by other authors after his death, stage adaptations, and eventually the 1939 MGM film that has made its imagery essentially permanent in American culture. The cowardly lion, the tin man, the scarecrow, the ruby slippers — these are not just childhood memories but a kind of shared symbolic vocabulary, available for appropriation by political speeches, advertisements, and films about entirely different subjects.

Baum’s Oz has been read as a populist allegory (the yellow brick road = the gold standard, the silver shoes = the silver monetary standard, Dorothy = the American everyman), as an early feminist fantasy (Dorothy is competent and decisive; the male figures are all lacking crucial attributes), as a dream narrative, as a Buddhist parable of finding what you already have, and as a straight-up adventure story for children. The proliferation of readings is a sign of a book that contains enough material to support all of them, or of a culture that finds it useful to have a shared imaginative space to project onto.

The 1939 film, which most people know better than the book, changes the ending significantly: in the book, Oz is a real place; in the film, it is Dorothy’s dream. The film’s ending — “there’s no place like home” — is a conservative moral about the value of ordinary domestic life. The book’s ending, in which Oz turns out to be real and Dorothy eventually moves there permanently, is something different: a story in which the magical alternative to ordinary life is genuinely available. Baum’s Oz keeps getting revised to make it less available. The revision tells you something about what each era needs from the story.

Nylon Stockings and the Thing That Replaced the Thing It Killed

On May 15, 1940, nylon stockings went on sale nationwide in the United States for the first time. They had been available in Wilmington, Delaware (DuPont’s headquarters city) on May 15, 1939 — a test market — and the nationwide launch followed exactly a year later. Four million pairs sold in the first four days. By the end of 1940, 64 million pairs had been sold.

The story of nylon is the story of Wallace Hume Carothers, a DuPont research chemist who was also a severe depressive who doubted whether his work had any value. Carothers invented nylon — the first synthetic polymer fiber — as part of a fundamental research program into polymer chemistry. He filed the key patent in 1937. He also invented neoprene. He died by suicide on April 29, 1937, at 41, two years before the product he invented went on sale. He never saw his stocking become the stocking. He left behind enough science to keep DuPont profitable for decades.

Nylon stockings replaced silk stockings, which had replaced cotton stockings, at a price point middle-class women could afford. The timing — 1940 — matters enormously: silk was primarily imported from Japan, and as relations between the U.S. and Japan deteriorated toward war, silk stockings became first scarce and then politically unacceptable. After Pearl Harbor, the nylon stocking became explicitly patriotic; women who donated their nylons for parachute production were participating in the war effort. “Nylons for the boys” was a real wartime slogan. After the war, the first postwar sale of nylons in Pittsburgh in 1945 caused near-riots: 40,000 women formed lines for 13,000 pairs. Police had to be called. The photograph of the Pittsburgh nylon line is one of the minor icons of postwar consumer history.

DuPont’s original marketing slogan for nylon — “strong as steel, fine as a spider’s web” — was technically accurate. Nylon’s tensile strength per unit weight exceeds steel. The marketing copy happened to be science. This is rarer than it should be.

The Streak That Began Without Anyone Noticing

May 15 is also International Day of Families, declared by the United Nations in 1993 — a designation so general as to mean nearly anything, or nothing, depending on what you define “family” to include, which is currently a contested question in most of the world’s political systems.

And it is the date in 1941 when Joe DiMaggio began his 56-game hitting streak, the longest in major league baseball history and one of the most extreme statistical outliers in professional sports. DiMaggio’s streak is so far from the expected distribution of baseball performance that analyses have repeatedly been written to determine whether it is humanly possible — the answer is yes, but it is very unlikely, and it has not happened again in the 80-plus years since.

The streak began quietly. DiMaggio went 1-for-4 against the White Sox on May 15, 1941. He did not know it was beginning. He would not know it was historic until he was well into it. The record it eventually broke — George Sisler’s 41-game streak from 1922 — was not well-remembered by 1941. By the time DiMaggio reached 42, the streak had become national news, and the question of how long it would last became the dominant sports story of the summer, in a summer when the U.S. was watching Europe burn and trying to decide whether to step in.

Also on This Day

• 1536: Anne Boleyn is convicted of adultery, incest, and high treason in a trial lasting approximately two hours. The charges are almost certainly fabricated — Henry VIII wanted to end the marriage and could not obtain an annulment. She is executed three days later. Her daughter by Henry, who is two years old at the time of Anne’s execution, will become Queen Elizabeth I.
• 1756: Britain declares war on France, beginning the Seven Years’ War in Europe. The war is already underway in North America (where it is called the French and Indian War) and India. It is arguably the first truly global war: fought on five continents, involving powers from Europe, Asia, and the Americas. It ends in 1763 with France ceding most of its North American possessions to Britain and Spain — reshaping the geopolitical map of the Americas before the American Revolution.
• 1928: Mickey Mouse makes his first appearance, in the silent cartoon Plane Crazy, which is a test screening not widely released until 1929. His first widely seen appearance is in Steamboat Willie (November 1928), which is also among the first synchronized sound cartoons. The squeaky voice that Walt Disney himself provided for Mickey is one of the most recognizable sounds in entertainment history.
• 1988: The Soviet Union begins withdrawing its troops from Afghanistan, nine years after the invasion began. The withdrawal completes in February 1989. The war has cost the Soviet Union an estimated 15,000 soldiers’ lives and contributed materially to the economic and political collapse of the USSR two years later. The country they leave behind falls into civil war, then Taliban rule. The pattern of outside powers entering Afghanistan and departing in worse shape than they arrived continues into the 21st century.
• 2011: IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn is arrested at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York, pulled off an Air France flight, on charges of sexual assault. The charges are later dropped. Strauss-Kahn, who had been considered a leading candidate for the French presidency, never recovers politically. The case generates early arguments about press coverage of powerful men accused of sexual misconduct — arguments that became much larger several years later.

Related Articles

• May 14: Lewis and Clark Push Off, Israel Is Born, and Skylab Falls Upward
• May 12: Florence Nightingale, the Limerick Soviet, and the Day the Crossword Became a Book
• May 7: Beethoven’s Ninth, the Lusitania, and National Cosmopolitan Day

As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases. This post contains affiliate links.

You Might Also Like

May 6

May 7

May 5: Cinco de Mayo, Napoleon's Last Word, and the World's Most Misunderstood Holiday