"Wilford tells the dramatic story of how, through the ages, technology - compasses, sextants, theodolites, cameras, airplanes, radar, sonar, computers, seismic probes, lasers, satellites - has transformed the way we see and measure our world. He details the innovations, from John Harrison's eighteenth-century marine chronometer, which enabled navigators to calculate longitude at sea, to the Pentagon's Global Positioning System (GPS), now used as widely...

Many people have a love of maps. But what lies behind the process of map-making? How have cartographers through the centuries developed their craft and established a language of maps which helps them to better represent our world and users to understand it? This book tells the story of how widely accepted mapping conventions originated and evolved - from map orientation, projections, typography and scale, to the use of colour, map symbols, ways of...