Why Can't We Find These Mountains?

hey 42 here thought to have been made in 1504 and rediscovered by a belgian map collective the ostrich egg globe is notable for several reasons the first and most obvious is that the globe itself is quite literally made out of uniquely carved lower halves of two ostrich eggshells not only an extremely unusual material but one that's done well to survive undamaged for half a millennium the globe is thought to be one of the very oldest in existence and the oldest who featured the americas which were discovered a few years earlier by italian explorer christopher columbus in 1492. the globe also includes the first known usage of the phrase hexant draconess that's here are dragons if you don't happen to be too hot on latin we usually associate this phrase with dangerous or uncharted lands on old maps but its location on the ostrich globe suggests another possible explanation just off the east coast of asia high schoolness may originally have been a reference to the island of komodo home to the world's largest living lizard the komodo dragon these monstrous reptiles may not breathe fire but they can be up to three meters long weigh almost as much as an adult male and are capable of taking down prey as large as water buffalo due to some similarities with sketches made by leonardo da vinci there's some speculation that the mysterious ostrich globe was made by the great italian polymath himself but that is yet to be proven and since the globe's owner appears to be the man behind the research we can probably take it with a pinch of salt whatever its origin take one cursory look at the ostrich egg globe and you'll see that the world it depicts bears only a passing resemblance to one you've probably zoomed around on google maps at one time or another most of the important bits are included but the exact shape and position of pretty much everywhere is to put it mildly a bit try drawing a map of the world from memory with your eyes closed and you'll probably end up closer to the real thing than leonardo did on this occasion but we can hardly blame him given the time period most of us use maps on an almost daily basis we take it for granted that we can explore our local area or even the entire world in my new detail just by taking out our phones and making a few quick taps that's probably why it's easy to forget that highly accurate maps are actually an extremely recent invention before modern mapping techniques came along our knowledge of exactly what went where on our very own planet was at times almost comically bad to illustrate this point i encourage you to grab the nearest atlas and try to find the mountains of kong actually don't bother you'd have about as much luck scoping around for mordor that is unless your map happens to be a little out of date because whilst the mountains of kung certainly don't exist they did appear on the latest and greatest maps mankind had to offer as recently as 1892 and we aren't talking some pokey hills in and out of the way corner of the globe here the mountains of kong were said to form a majestic range that spanned half of africa from guinea to the mountains of moon which also don't exist just in case you were wondering the mountains of kong first showed up on the maps that were created after the african expeditions of famous scottish explorer mungo park quite how old mungo managed to explore his way through a mountain range that wasn't there isn't known but since few westerners ventured into that part of the world at the time nobody in europe was able to refute the existence of the mountains for almost 100 years not knowing any better cartographers continue to perpetuate the original error over and over and over again today our maps are of course far more accurate but even now we can't claim total cartographic mastery over every corner of the globe parts of the amazon rainforest like the austria-sized vale du jafari for example which is home to some 6 000 uncontacted or sometimes just a little bit contacted indigenous people remains largely unmapped to this day then there's gang carpentium very likely the world's tallest unclimbed mountain which is located in bhutan along the border with tibet somewhere until very recently world maps couldn't quite agree on exactly where that somewhere was with different maps showing the mountain in very different places and listing it at markedly different heights there was so much general confusion around just where this 7000 meter mountain actually was that when bhutan first opened up its ranges to mountaineers in 1983 the first expedition to attempt to reach the summit was unsuccessful not because of the challenge of the climb or the brutal conditions but because the mountaineers couldn't actually find the mountain in the first place and it isn't just remote areas that give modern day cartographers trouble the sheer rate of change they have to deal with means maps become out of date almost as soon as they're printed coastlines around the world shift due to erosion and areas of intense volcanic activity can alter the local landscape overnight we humans love to mess things up too our roads cities and agricultural lands change dramatically from year to year and we can't get enough of tearing down forests damming rivers and causing general mayhem wherever we go all this without even considering the truly hard to map places on earth like the ocean floor of which only about 19 is currently mapped to any kind of reasonable resolution in short the world is very big very full and it has a habit of changing in subtle ways the moment we turn our backs all of which makes the production of highly accurate maps difficult and keeping track of every tiny detail on those maps almost impossible which probably explains how manhattan-sized sandy island off the coast of french territory new caledonia in the south pacific could be found on google earth as recently as 2013. it no doubt came as something of a surprise to the team of australian scientists who paid sandy island a visit in 2012 then that it wasn't actually there despite having appeared on our best maps and nautical charts for over 100 years sandy island doesn't exist and very likely never did but every once in a while something erroneous appears on a map not due to the overactive imagination of some travel weary explorer or even because of basic human error sometimes cartographers get things wrong quite deliberately take a glory in delaware county new york as a prime example which appeared on maps produced by one-time top u.s road map publisher general drafting between 1930 and 1998. anyone who came across a glory whilst pursuing the map would see nothing untoward just a small insignificant hamlet in upstate new york but try and actually go there and you would soon have a problem because much like sandy island a glory doesn't exist the name of this fictional town is in fact an anagram of the initials of general drafting's founders otto g lindbergh and ernest alpers they made it up and placed it on their map intentionally but why would a successful map maker put their good name and reputation on the line by deliberately sabotaging their own product the answer is actually rather ingenious as we've already seen cartography is a challenging business and even modern technology sometimes struggles to get things right back in 1930 making maps was a time-consuming painstaking process that involved a great deal of money manpower and expertise but whilst good maps are extremely difficult to make they're absolutely trivial to copy get your hands on any well-regarded map and you could print your own version of it without too much trouble and since you wouldn't have to worry about any of that expensive and difficult mapping nonsense you could probably undercut the original map maker's prices whilst you were at it as you've probably guessed already that's where our glowy new york comes in it's a copyright trap also known as a paper town phantom settlement or sometimes believe it or not a mount weasel copyright traps are used by map makers as a nifty way of catching plagiarists the idea is simple if a glory new york ever appeared on a rival map otto and ernest of general drafting would have known immediately that their intellectual property had been infringed after all how could anyone else have possibly plotted a town that doesn't exist it just so happens that this particular copyright trap actually worked or at least it kind of did because a glory did indeed appear on a map produced by one of general drafting's rivals rand mcnally some years after the trap was set up the general drafting lawyered up and took rand mcnally to court but whilst it sounds like this was an open and shut case there was a catch in the meantime a general store had been built on the empty intersection where a glory was supposed to be located having spotted the name a glory on his own map the owner of the store quite reasonably decided to call his new place of business the glory general store exactly where he thought the rest of the town was supposed to be hiding is unclear but what was crystal clear to rand mcnelly's lawyers was that a glory did indeed exist and therefore no copyright infringement could be proven unsurprisingly considering nobody else lived there the glowy general store went out of business soon after these events took place it turns out copyright traps like a glory appear on maps all over the world looking across the pond one of the uk's most famous maps the london a to z is known to be riddled with so-called trap streets much like paper towns these fictional streets are placed in out of the way places ready to fool unsuspecting plagiarists and the occasional lost chinese tourist according to a 2005 statement from a spokesperson working for the company who publishes the ataz the famous guide to london's incredibly confusing roads and alleyways contains as many as 100 trap streets dotted here and there to catch out the unwary and presumably to confuse the out of london taxi drivers completing the knowledge a test all black cab drivers must take which requires them to memorize every single street in the english capital one of my absolute favorite fictional towns is the city of bielefeld in germany most copyright traps are hidden in out of the way places so as to be effective at weeding out the cheats whilst being extremely unlikely to trip people up who are actually trying to use the map in question to navigate not so bielefeld which is purported to be a prosperous industrial city of some 300 000 inhabitants located between munster and hanover what makes bielefeld even more unusual as a phantom settlement however is the fact that it very much does exist its non-existence is actually a kind of light-hearted conspiracy theory based on three key questions do you know anyone from bielefeld have you ever been to be lefeld do you know anyone who has ever been to be lefeld answering no to each of these questions as most people naturally do is used as proof that the individual is complicit in the conspiracy which has been going strong for some 25 years the intention of the blfl conspiracy is actually to satirize conspiracy theorists who quickly believe something to be true i.e bilafeld not existing when it quite clearly does in 2019 the bielefeld council offered a 1 million euro prize to any person who could provide incontrovertible evidence of the city's non-existence they received thousands of responses attempting to do exactly that through creative use of mathematics physics and logic germany's federal office for geography and surveying even had a crack at winning the prize by publishing a brand new map of germany with bielefeld omitted as it turns out copyright traps exist outside of the world of cartography too remember how i said that phantom towns are sometimes known as mount weasels the name thankfully has nothing to do with the abuse of small mammals but is in fact inspired by the 1975 edition of new colombia encyclopedia which listed an entry for one lillian virginia mount weasel now cartographers are a fairly serious bunch and they tend to keep things pretty simple when trying to catch copyright cheats a tiny fictional street here and out of the way hamlet's there that sort of thing not so the encyclopedia makers those guys like to go big lillian virginia mount weasel was according to the new columbia encyclopedia a fountain designer turned photographer who died in an explosion whilst working for combustibles magazine her most famous work is said to have been a book called flags up a collection of photographs of rural american mailboxes and if you're stupid enough to fall for that one not only do you very much deserve to be sued but you probably shouldn't be making encyclopedias in the first place mega author of the false in our stars fame john green referenced this most absurd of copyright chaps in his 2008 novel paper towns which just as happens to feature one a glowy new york prominently in its plot one of the book's main characters margot ruff spielgmann owns a cat called mirna mount weasel a knot to the late great fountain designer photographer who is sadly no longer with us due to having exploded the new oxford american dictionary is known to have a punch on for a spot of mount weasling too ever heard of the word equivalence allow me to enlighten you according to the 2001 edition of the dictionary equivalence is defined as the willful avoidance of one's responsibilities and it is of course utterly made up god helped a dictionary maker whose shocking equivalence saw him copy the word for use in his own dictionary of course we youtubers have to watch out for intellectual property thieves too which is why i've secreted my very own round weasel right here in this video a deliberate mistake that if it ever appears in someone else's video i can see the living out of them happy hunting and thanks for watching you can now pre-order my brand new book stick a flag in it on amazon link in the description thank you

Channel: Thoughty2

Views: 967,499

Rating: 4.9245725 out of 5

Keywords: paper towns, maps, map, missing, mysterious, copyright, copyright trap, mountweazel, copyright law, mystery, unexplained, unexplained mysteries, unsolved mystery, copyright infringement, strange, paper towns film, unexplained videos, unsolved, what is copyright, mysteries, mysterious things, mysterious phenomena, mysterious events, mysterious videos, history, globe, atlas

Id: dwhtcdkzg9g

Length: 16min 4sec (964 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 24 2020