Flight 19: Five United States Navy TBM Avenger Torpedo Bombers went missing 75 years ago today on Dec. 5, 1945

One of the most famous aviation disappearances in the Bermuda Triangle was that of Flight 19, known as the “Lost Patrol” or “Lost Squadron” on Dec. 5,  1945. Or did they disappear in the Bermuda Triangle?

Made up of five United States Navy TBM-3 Avenger Torpedo Bombers, with 14 airmen on the five planes, Flight 19 took off on a routine overwater navigation and bombing training flight exercise from Naval Air Station Fort Lauderdale, and all five planes and 14 airmen vanished without a trace over the Bermuda Triangle, it was long believed, as did all 13 crew members of PBM-5 Bureau Number 59225, a Martin PBM Mariner patrol bomber flying boat sent out from Naval Air Station Banana River in Florida to look for the Lost Patrol.

Jon Myhre, a former Palm Beach International Airport controller, and Andy Marocco, a California businessman, told the Deerfield Beach South Florida Sun Sentinel in April 2014 they believe a torpedo bomber discovered in western Broward County in 1989 belonged to Lt. Charles Taylor, the commander and lead pilot of Flight 19, and that some of the other planes also crashed on land (Flight 19: Has mystery of Lost Patrol been solved? – South Florida Sun Sentinel – South Florida Sun-Sentinel (sun-sentinel.com). Marocco went to the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration at College Park, Maryland and obtained the Navy’s 500-page “Board of Investigation Report on the loss of Flight 19.”

In it, he found that the USS Solomons aircraft carrier, while off the coast of Daytona Beach, picked up a radar signal from four to six unidentified planes over North Florida, about 20 miles northwest of Flagler Beach. That was at about 7 p.m. on Dec. 5 1945, or about an hour and half after Flight 19 was due back at Naval Air Station Fort Lauderdale – today, Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport. The USS Solomons was built at Vancouver, Washington, and commissioned on Nov. 21, 1943. Named for an island in the mouth of a river in Maryland, the ship was designated an escort carrier, CVE-67. After an initial ferrying and transport run to Hawaii, the ship was then sent to the Atlantic.

Her next assignment was to help with anti-submarine patrols in the South Atlantic off of the South American coast. On her third patrol, the ship engaged and sank a German submarine in June 1944. During these operations, the ship lost two aircraft, but captured dozens of German prisoners. She conducted other submarine patrols before going back to transport a few months later.

Later in 1944, the ship went to Staten Island and then transported a group of airmen and their planes to Casablanca in French Morocco. For the rest of the war, the ship was used for qualification runs. Both the Navy and Marine Corps used the ship to get their pilots ready for combat duty. She started this off the coast of Rhode Island and later near Port Everglades in Florida. She continued operations until the end of the war.

The ship was decommissioned on May 15, 1946.

The disappeearance of Flight 19, known as the “Lost Patrol” or “Lost Squadron” became come fodder for all manner of wild theories and speculation. In the 1960s and 1970s, pulp magazines and writers such as Vincent Gaddis and Charles Berlitz helped popularize the idea that Flight 19 had been gobbled up by the “Bermuda Triangle,” a section of the Atlantic supposedly known for its high volume of freak disappearances and mechanical failures. Other books and fictional portrayals have suggested that magnetic anomalies, parallel dimensions and alien abductions might have all played a role in the tragedy. In 1977, the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind famously depicted Flight 19 as having been whisked away by flying saucers and later deposited in the deserts of Mexico.

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Soundingsjohnbarker: ‘You can write that?’ You bet

https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/) debuted as a WordPress blog two years ago today with a small post headlined “Labour history: Mine-Mill v. Steel” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/03/labour-history-mine-mill-v-steel/) on September 3, 2014 about Mick Lowe’s The Raids, a 295-page fictionalized work centred on the epic battle in Sudbury in the late 1950s and early 1960s in relation to the Cold War, international politics, McCarthyism, Communism, and the inter-union rivalry between the United Steel Workers of America (USWA) and the International Union of Mine, Mill & Smelter Workers Local 598, which had just been published that May by Robin Philpot of Baraka Books in Montreal. Here in Thompson there is a still partially untold story of that same inter-union rivalry between the Union of Mine, Mill & Smelter Workers and United Steelworkers of America between 1960 and 1962. Mine-Mill was the first bargaining agent here in Thompson when Inco workers unionized and had negotiated a contract with Inco that ran through 1964. But the USW was certified by the Manitoba Labour Board as the bargaining agent for Inco employees in Thompson on May 31, 1962. Because the USW itself went on to merge five years later with the United States section of the International Union of Mine, Mill & Smelter Workers in Tucson, Arizona in January 1967, a lot of that nastiness has been papered over, at least publicly.

There was also a post that day headlined “Black Death: Not so bad?” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/03/black-death-not-so-bad/) which went onto explain a new study in PLOS ONE, an international peer-reviewed journal, authored by University of South Carolina anthropologist Sharon DeWitte, which suggested that people who survived the medieval plague, commonly known then as the Black Death, lived significantly longer and were healthier than people who lived before the epidemic struck in 1347. The Black Death killed tens of millions of people, an estimated 30 to 50 per cent of the European population, over just four years between 1347 and 1351, which, it turns out, may not have been such a bad thing after all.

Finally, on Sept. 3, 2014, soundingsjohnbarker had a third posting headlined “A bigger picture,” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/03/a-bigger-picture/) which focused on Samaritan’s Purse’s “Operation Christmas Child,” which was started in 1990. By 1993, it had grown to the point it was adopted by Samaritan’s Purse, a Christian organization founded by Dr. Bob Pierce in 1970 and now run by Franklin Graham, son of 97-year-old Asheville, North Carolina evangelist Billy Graham.  While “Operation Christmas Child” has its share of supporters and critics with meritorious arguments on both sides for and against its “shoebox” gifts collected and distributed in more than 130 countries worldwide each Christmas [each shoebox is filled with hygiene items, school supplies, toys, and candy. Operation Christmas Child then works with local churches to put on age-appropriate presentations of the gospel at the events where the shoeboxes are distributed], Samaritan’s Purse is about much more than Operation Christmas Child, whatever your views might be on that, I pointed out. In the midst of the deadliest Ebola viral hemorrhagic fever outbreak recorded in West Africa since the disease was discovered in 1976, Samaritan Purse’s Ebola care centre on the outskirts of the Liberian capital of Monrovia was right on the front lines. Dr. Kent Brantly, the medical director of the centre, contracted Ebola and was medically evacuated to Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, the first patient ever medically evacuated to the United States for Ebola treatment, where he was given ZMapp, an experimental drug treatment produced by U.S.-based Mapp Biopharmaceutical, while Nancy Writebol, who was with Serving in Mission, (SIM), which runs the hospital where Samaritan’s Purse has the Ebola care centre, was also medically evacuated to Emory University Hospital and treated with ZMapp.  Both Brantly and Writebol survived their brush with death Ebola experiences and returned to Liberia.

So that was Day 1 for soundingsjohnbarker on Sept. 3, 2014. And in some ways it set the tone for the 226 posts that have followed since over the last two years. Some of them tell Thompson stories but many don’t. Some (OK, many) are offbeat and the range of topics that has struck my fancy to write about has been eclectic, if not downright eccentric at times. I explained some of my thinking behind how I choose what to write about in a blog post March 7 headlined “Tipping points and blogging by the numbers” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2016/03/07/tipping-points-and-blogging-by-the-numbers/) where I noted, “Write local if you want some big numbers on a given day. While I do from time to time, if some local issue or story interests me in an unusual way, I stay away from that kind of writing for the most part. For one thing, those kind of stories, I find, have little staying power, with three or four rare local exceptions (an unsolved murder story; a story about Dr. Alan Rich’s retirement and local lawyer Alain Huberdeau’s appointment to the provincial court bench; and several Vale stories come to mind). But most of them are one or two day wonders. It’s the more eccentric pieces on other places and even times that have a deeper and wider audience in the long run. Fortunately, I prefer to write on more eclectic things these days without any particular regard for geography or subject matter if the topic strikes my interest. Thompson city council may well make decisions that affect me in myriad ways, not the least of which is in the pocketbook as a local taxpayer, but even that can’t remove the glaze from my eyes long enough to write much about local municipal politics, although our water bills are tempting me to make an exception. But reading newspaper accounts of such goings on is usually painful enough. Mind you, I realize what strikes my fancy to write about when I don’t write local, is not for everyone, and I have no doubt that I’ve created some eye glazing of my own especially when I write on eschatology or some other arcane to some of my local readers religious topic.”

That’s not to say I’ve lost my interest in local affairs. I live here after all. But I don’t have the inclination, or time even if I had, to write about all of them. So, pretty much like everyone else in Thompson, I rely on the local media, including the Thompson Citizen and Nickel Belt News, CBC Radio’s North Country, Arctic Radio’s thompsononline.ca and Shaw TV to keep me informed with occasional stories about Vale’s proposed Thompson Foot Wall Deep Project, at the north end of Thompson Mine, previously known as Thompson (1D), and what the chances of the 11 million tonnes of nickel mineralization, which form a deep, north plunging continuation of the Thompson deposit, have of being developed into a new mine that will sustain the Thompson operation for up to 15 years when nickel is selling on the London Metal Exchange (LME) for US$4.5269/lb, with the refinery and smelter, which opened March 25, 1961, set to close sometime in 2018, resulting in lost jobs – don’t kid yourself and think otherwise – as more than 30 per cent of Vale’s production employees in Thompson work in the smelter and refinery.

Take away nickel mining, which isn’t destined fortunately to happen for at least several decades yet in even the most pessimistic scenario, and there’s not much reason for Thompson, at least as we have all come to know it, to exist, all mindless happy talk from politicians, newspaper publishers and other spin doctors aside. Mind you, I have admittedly been a tad critical of newspaper publishers in this space before, writing on Sept. 14, 2014: “In the old days, publishers and newspaper owners would from time to time ‘kill’ a writer’s column before publication. Despite their ballyhoo and blather about freedom of the press, publishers and newspaper proprietors are almost universally in my long experience with them a timid lot, if not outright moral cowards at times, always afraid of offending someone.”(https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/11/retroactively-spiked-the-post-publication-killing-of-msgr-charles-popes-blog-post-on-new-york-citys-st-patricks-day-parade/).

But if you think being a regional hub for Northern Manitoba, or tourism, or even both, is going to give Thompson a new raison d’etre for continued existence at its current size and state in a somehow magically more diversified local economy sans nickel mining some day in the near-to-mid future, I’m afraid you’ve been drinking too much of the Thompson Economic Diversification Working Group (TEDWG) Kool-Aid.

I’m a bit of a contrarian when it comes to the local good news peddlers of all stripes. So it’s perhaps best for everyone’s peace of mind, mine included, if I stick these days to writing mainly about the faraway and eclectic. Bad news prophets have a short best-before date at home.

And besides there is something just plain fun about writing about the weird and whacky. It’s a good antidote to taking either yourself, or life for that matter, too seriously. Hence I’m just as incorrigible when it comes to posting stories or links from others about the offbeat and odd on Facebook, as I am about my own blog post writing, I must confess. “The internet has been aflame this summer with predictions the Antichrist was coming Aug. 30,” I mentioned in a Facebook posting Aug, 31, noting I had forgotten all about it until the next day. “Me bad,” I wrote. When my old friend from Iqaluit Michèle LeTourneau found herself among those who couldn’t resist joining the thread to comment, she observed “OK. I think I just officially outed myself as a weird nut that posts really weird things on Facebook. Maybe I am. Maybe I’m not.” I reassured her by replying, “I think I could give you a bit of competition for the ‘weird nut Facebook poster’ title, Michèle!”

Locally, the Thompson Citizen was moved to editorialize Aug. 31 that “Northern Manitoba’s summer of woe turned [a] deeper shade of blue with the announcement Aug. 22 that Tolko was shutting down its operations in The Pas.”

Tolko Industries said they were going to pull the plug Dec. 2 on their heavy-duty kraft paper and lumber mill in The Pas after 19 years, leaving all 332 employees unemployed. The mill in The Pas has been a money-loser for years. It was conceived by the Progressive Conservative provincial government of premier Duff Roblin in 1966.

Less than a month before Tolko pulled the plug on its mill in The Pas, OmniTRAX, the Denver-based short line railroad, which owns the Port of Churchill, announced on July 25 it would be laying off or not re-hiring about 90 port workers, as it was cancelling the 2016 grain shipping season. OmniTRAX bought most of Northern Manitoba’s rail track from The Pas to Churchill in 1997 from CN for $11 million. OmniTRAX took over the related Port of Churchill, which opened in 1929, when it acquired it from Canada Ports Corporation, for a token $10 soon after buying the rail line. The Port of Churchill has the largest fuel terminal in the Arctic and is North America’s only deep water Arctic seaport that offers a gateway between North America and Mexico, South America, Europe and the Middle East. OmniTRAX created Hudson Bay Railway in 1997, the same year it took over operation of the Port of Churchill. It operates 820 kilometres of track in Manitoba between The Pas and Churchill.

At the time the cancellation was announced, OmniTRAX did not have a single committed grain shipping contract. Normally, the Port of Churchill has a 14-week shipping season from July 15 to Oct. 31. When the Canadian Wheat Board lost its grain monopoly, creating a new grain market several years ago, and was renamed G3 Canada Ltd. by its new owners, the newly-minted G3 Canada Ltd. began building a network of grain elevators, terminals and vessels that bypasses Churchill and uses the Great Lakes, St. Lawrence River and West Coast to move grain to foreign markets. Surprise.

While OmniTRAX accepted a letter of intent last December from Mathias Colomb First Nation, Tataskweyak Cree Nation and the War Lake First Nation to buy its rail assets in Manitoba, along with the Port of Churchill, the deal has not been completed to date, and its future looks murky to non-existent. Rail freight shipments measured by frequency along the Bayline have been cut in half by OmniTRAX this summer.

“Government announces more grant money to develop tourism during visit to Churchill” headlined the Nickel Belt News in an unbylined front page story Sept. 2.  Don’t get me wrong. I love Beluga whales and polar bears. I’ve seen both visiting Churchill (known as Kuugjuaq in Inuit.) And guess what? While Beluga whales and polar bears will support some local tourism and related businesses, it’s still not enough to make for a local sustainable economy of any scale in the community of less than 800 permanent residents now along our Hudson Bay coast.

That’s about as likely to happen as calling itself the “Wolf Capital of the World” is going make a game-changing difference to Thompson’s economic future. A difference, sure. Great. But don’t bet Northern Manitoba’s future on tourism. We’re still either a resource-based economy or no economy to speak of.  If it’s any comfort that remains largely true for most of our provinces and territories and Canada as a whole. Sure there’s the capital cities and a few other kinda largish provincial cities – Victoria, Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Regina, Winnipeg, Toronto, Ottawa, Montréal, Québec City, Moncton, Saint John, Halifax and St. John’s (this is a very generous reading BTW) – and even a few more genuine high-tech areas such as Gatineau, Québec and Kanata, Ontario on either side of Ottawa, along with Kitchener, Ontario and elsewhere in the Regional Municipality of Waterloo, all of which are exceptions to the hewers of wood and drawers of water reality, but the exceptions are few and far between.

Oops … did I say that out loud? Me bad.

Kool-Aid anyone?

I may need to quench my thirst unless I intend to pen my next post on UFOs, eschatology or perhaps some virulent disease, preferably a safe distance from Thompson.

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Butch Cassidy and the end of an era in the Wild West, also known as the Old West

Today marks the 149th anniversary of the birth of Butch Cassidy, the last of the legendary Wild West or Old West bank and train robbers, in Beaver in what was then the Utah Territory. Utah was admitted to statehood on Jan. 4, 1896. Beaver is 210 miles southwest of Salt Lake City and 220 miles northeast of Las Vegas, situating it about halfway between the two cities.

The first settlers came to Beaver from Parowan, about 35 miles to the southwest, in April 1856, a decade before Cassidy’s birth as Robert Leroy Parker, a son of Mormon parents who had answered Brigham Young’s call for young couples to help build communities of Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints adherents.

Parker was the first of 13 children born to Max and Annie Parker.

On June 24, 1889, Parker, who had taken to using the alias George Cassidy, committed his first big-league crime, robbing a bank in Telluride, Colorado, of more than $20,000. It was while laying low afterwards, while he worked in a Rock Springs, Wyoming, butcher shop, that he earned the nickname  “Butch” Cassidy, which would become one of the most famous criminal aliases in American history.

In 1894, Cassidy was arrested for horse theft in Wyoming. He served two years in the Wyoming Territorial Prison at Laramie. Upon his release, he quickly returned to a life of crime, putting together a gang of outlaws that became known as the Wild Bunch.

Cassidy’s most famous partner was Harry Longbaugh, better known as the “Sundance Kid.” Longbaugh’s nickname came in 1888 after his release from jail in the town of Sundance, the county seat for Crook County in the then Wyoming Territory, about 270 miles north of Cheyenne, where he had served time for horse theft. Wyoming was admitted to statehood immediately preceding Utah on July 10, 1890.

Other members of the Wild Bunch included Harvey Logan, alias Kid Curry; Ben “The Tall Texan” Kilpatrick; Harry Tracy, Deaf Charley Hanks and Tom “Black Jack” Ketchum.

The Wild Bunch specialized in holding up railroad express cars, and the gang was sometimes called the Train Robbers’ Syndicate.

The characters of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid were, of course, forever immortalized in the 1969 film bearing their names, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, starring Paul Newman as Butch Cassidy and Robert Redford as the Sundance Kid. The film won three Academy Awards in 1970.

As the 19th century came to a close, the Wild West was no longer quite so wild. In fact, Larry  Schweikart, a professor of American history at the University of Dayton, and Lynne Pierson Doti, the David and Sandra Stone Professor of Economics at Chapman University in Orange, California, argue in their 1991 book, Banking in the American West from the Gold Rush to Deregulation, argue that at least in terms of bank robberies, most of what we believe to be true is really myth and there were in a 40-year period in the late 19th century, spread across 15 states and territories, including every state or territory west of the Missouri/Minnesota/Texas line, specifically, Arizona, California, Colorado, the Dakotas, Kansas, Idaho, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, maybe a dozen bank robberies including two major ones pulled by Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. In any event, the Old West was becoming both more populous and efficient in terms of law enforcement. The frontier was closing.

Tired of his robberies, railroad executives hired detectives to catch Cassidy and began placing mounted guards in railcars to pursue the Wild Bunch.

In 1901, Cassidy fled the United States for Argentina accompanied by his lover, Etta Place, and the Sundance Kid. The trio homesteaded a ranch at Cholila, though Place returned to the United States after several years. In 1904, Cassidy and Sundance learned that detectives had tracked them to South America. They abandoned the Cholila ranch and resumed a life of robbery in Argentina, Chile, and Bolivia.

While there is no conclusive evidence to prove it, Bolivian troops reportedly killed Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in the village of San Vicente in 1908.

The families of both men insist, however, that the men survived and returned to live into old age in the United States.

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Maps and Mercator

I’ve always liked maps of the world, atlases and globes. As a kid, I could spend hours lost in them and the real places they could take me in an imaginary way. I’m certainly not a cartographer and my high school geography teachers would probably rate me as only so-so, doing better in the social aspects of geography than the physical sciences aspect.

Sharpies $$$ Store in Southwood Shopping Plaza in Thompson is pretty much right behind the area of Juniper Drive I live on. Last fall, Jeanette and me wandered in on a Saturday afternoon and emerged each with $2 roll-down The World Political Atlantic Centred HPC Publishers’ Distributors Pvt. Ltd. wall maps from 2012. Mine is hanging over my desk at home as I write this. The HPC Publishers’ Distributors Pvt. Ltd. Mercator projection map carries several disclaimers. The most general one in the fine print is that “boundary representation is not necessarily authoritative.”

Interestingly, but perhaps not very surprising since the map was made in New Delhi, India tops the list when it comes to acknowledgements, including a 2011 copyright, in the bottom right hand corner of the map: “The Topographical details within India are based upon Survey of India map with the permission of the Surveyor General or India.” And “the territorial waters of India extend into the sea to a distance of twelve nautical miles measured from the appropriate base line.” Or the External Boundary and Coast-Line of India on the map agrees with the RecordMaster copy certified by the Survey of India.”

If I glance up just a few inches from writing a post for my blog at https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/, I can view a fascinating factbox bar running full length along the bottom of the 27-inch vertical x 37-inch horizontal map, letting me know that the driest place on Earth is not, as I might have guessed, somewhere like the Arabian Peninsula’s Rub al Khali, or Empty Quarter desert of Saudi Arabia, Oman and Yemen, but rather the Atacama Desert of Chile in South America, with “rainfall barely measurable.”

One afternoon a few months ago I was glancing up just a bit above the factbox at the bottom of the map when my eye was drawn to San Carlos de Bariloche in the province of Río Negro, Argentina, situated in the foothills of the Andes on the southern shores of Nahuel Huapi Lake. A few clicks more and Wikipedia told me that according to the 2010 census the city “has a permanent population of 108,205” and “after development of extensive public works and Alpine-styled architecture,” San Carlos de Bariloche at 41° 9′ 0″ S latitude “emerged in the 1930s and 1940s as a major tourism centre with ski, trekking and mountaineering facilities. In addition, it has numerous restaurants, cafés, and chocolate shops.” Sounds most pleasant, all in all.

Today, of course, marks the 503rd birthday of Gerhard Kremer, who is better known for the Latinized version of his name, Gerardus Mercator. The name Kremer in German, and Cremer in Dutch both mean merchant. The Latin name for a merchant was Mercator.

Mercator is the Flemish mathematician and cartographer, who in 1569 “discovered how to create a flat map that takes into consideration the curvatures of the earth,” writes  Kevin McSpadden in TIME magazine online, noting Mercator “has been honored in a new Google doodle.”

Even before Larry Page and Sergey Brin incorporated Google in September 1998, the concept of the doodle was born when Page and Brin placed a stick figure drawing behind the second “o” in the word, Google, intended as a comical message to Google users that the founders were “out of office.”

Two years later in 2000, they asked then Google webmaster Dennis Hwang to produce a doodle for Bastille Day. It was so well received by users that Hwang was appointed Google’s “chief doodler” and doodles started showing up more and more regularly on the Google homepage.

“In the beginning,” Google says, “they mostly celebrated familiar holidays; nowadays, they highlight a wide array of events and anniversaries from the 1st Drive-In Movie to the educator Maria Montessori.”

Since 1998 there have been more than 2,000 doodles on Google’s homepage. You can see them all at http://www.google.com/doodles

“Jailed for heresy in 1544, Mercator later revolutionized navigational theory,” McSpadden writes in TIME.  “His theory, dubbed the ‘Mercator projection,’ was a major breakthrough for navigation because for the first time sailors could plot a route using straight lines without constantly adjusting their compass readings.

“However, because the projection lengthens the longitudinal parallels, the scale of objects enlarge dramatically as they near the north and south poles and the method becomes unusable at around 70 degrees north/south.

By increasingly inflating the sizes of regions according to their distance from the equator, the Mercator projections results in a representation of Greenland that is larger than Africa, which has a geographic area 14 times greater than Greenland’s. Since much of the Third World lies near the equator, these countries appear smaller on a Mercator projection.

Other major misconceptions based on Mercator projection maps are:

• Alaska is nearly as large as the continental United States;
• Europe (excluding Russia) is only a bit larger than South America;
• Antarctica dwarfs all the continents.

In reality:

• Alaska can fit inside the continental United States about three times;
• South America nearly doubles Europe’s land mass;
• Antarctica looks like the second-smallest continent.

German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss’ differential geometry Theorema Egregium (Latin for “Remarkable Theorem”) demonstrates, however, that no planar or flat map of the Earth can be perfect, even for a portion of the Earth’s surface. Every cartographic projection necessarily distorts at least some distances. The Mercator projection preserves angles but fails to preserve area.

The rival Gall–Peters projection, a configurable equal-area map projection, known as the equal-area cylindric or cylindrical equal-area projection, named after 19th century Scottish clergyman James Gall, and 20th century German historian Arno Peters, and unveiled in 1974 as the Peters World Map, is widely used in the British school system and is promoted by the United Nations Educational and Scientific Cultural Organization (UNESCO), Oxfam, the National Council of Churches, the Mennonite Central Committee and New Internationalist magazine because of its ability to communicate visually the actual relative sizes of the various regions of the planet. While the Peters World Map doesn’t enlarge areas as much as the Mercator projection, certain places appear stretched, horizontally near the poles, and vertically near the Equator.

“Mercator was ahead of his time, not living to see his discovery become fully employed, but ‘by the eighteenth century the projection had been adopted almost universally by European navigators,’” TIME wrote in 2013.

Mercator was born on March 5, 1512, in the town of Rupelmonde in Flanders, which is today part of Belgium. He was educated in the Netherlands and in 1544 was charged with heresy on the basis of his sympathy for Protestantism and suspicions about his frequent travels.

He was held in custody in prison for seven months before the charges were dropped.

Mercator died on Dec. 2, 1594.

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