“Gleason’s map could conceptually be made by placing a flat horizontal paper just above a translucent globe whose north pole is at the top then placing a bright LED at the south pole and making each feature according to where its shadow falls on the paper,” Goldhaber-Gordon said. The team at Boston Rare Maps ( here), which sold a rare copy of the map, said on their website they read the passage in the patent application, “as Gleason unwittingly fessing up that his map is, like any other, a projection of a globe or section thereof onto a flat surface.”

Gleason did not publicly address the contradiction between his book and his patent application. Specifically, Gleason said: “The extortion of the map from that of a globe consists, mainly in the straightening out of the meridian lines allowing each to retain their original value from Greenwich, the equator to the two poles.” The application states that the map is extracted from the earth as a globe. Patent Office for the map appears to contradict this. In May 1893, Gleason patented the invention of the “New Standard Map of the World”, a projection of the earth centered on the north pole, which can be found ( here).īut while Gleason argued the earth is flat in his book, his application to the U.S. On page 350, he mentions “a new map of the world as it is” and says, “it contains all the continents and principal islands and rivers of the world, also, all the principal cities of the earth.” ( here) Gleason argued that the earth is flat in his 1890 book “Is the Bible from Heaven? Is the Earth a Globe?” ( here). They say “where expletive is Antarctica,” pointing to the “ice ring that goes around” the world. One Instagram user ( here) shared a TikTok video which tries to challenge the fact that that Gleason’s map is a projection of the earth as a globe. Some social media users are saying that Alexander Gleason’s 19th Century “New Standard Map of the World” is proof that the earth is flat and that Antarctica is not a continent but an ice ring that circles the earth’s edges.

Un flat earth map