The Sleight Doctor 🃏🍉 on Nostr: The Mercator became standard mainly because it was useful for navigation. The ...

The Mercator became standard mainly because it was useful for navigation. The meridians and lines of latitude are all parallel, so any straight line corresponds to a route on a constant heading (known as a "rhumb line"). Gerardus achieved this by mapping our globe onto a cylinder.

However, yes, it also had the useful ancillary benefit of flattering European colonialists! I don't recall ever being taught in school that it distorts the relative sizes of nations and continents.