Ep. 201 – Mapping the World, or how Germans invented America

<p>When you enter the great hall of the Thomas Jefferson building at the Library of Congress in Washington, the first exhibit you will be facing is their Gutenberg Bible. And it is one of the finest Gutenberg bibles around, one of only three surviving pristine copies on vellum. This was the kind of bible that was so expensive to produce, it bankrupted Gutenberg. When the Library of Congress bought it in 1930, they paid $375,000, roughly $7.5m in today’s money. </p><p>But this is not the most expensive piece in the library’s collection. That would a work by two Germans, Martin Waldseemüller and Matthias Ringmann. And it is not even a book, but a map. Not a small map, it is 2.3m or 91 inches wide and 1.3m or 50 inches tall. </p><p>And this map, printed in 1507 claimed to be:</p><p>A DESCRIPTION OF THE WHOLE WORLD ON BOTH</p><p>A GLOBE AND A FLAT SURFACE WITH THE INSERTION</p><p>OF THOSE LANDS UNKNOWN TO PTOLEMY</p><p>DISCOVERED BY RECENT MEN</p><p>And the authors wrote that the three con...