page_title: Prime meridian
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Prime meridian / History
caption_attribution_description: English: World Map (Original text&#58; National Library of Australia World Map) Description=Carta universal en que se contiene todo lo que del mundo se ha descubierto fasta agora, hizola Diego Ribero cosmographo de su magestad, año de 1529, e[n] Sevilla / La cual se devide en dos partes conforme A la capitulacion que hizieron los catholicos Reyes de españa y el rrey don Juan de portogual En Tordesillas Año de 1494 Facsimile made in London by W. Griggs, ca. 1887? 1 map on 2 sheets: col.; 58 x 140 cm., sheets 61 x 79 cm and 61 x 66 cm. Note: "Reproduced from the original in the Museum of the 'Propaganda' in Rome, lent by His Holiness Pope Leo XIII, by W. Griggs, London." In lower margin: The second Borgian map by Diego Ribero, Seville 1529 Español: Facsímil de la carta universal realizada por Diego Ribero en 1529.) Título original=Carta universal en que se contiene todo lo que del mundo se ha descubierto fasta agora, hizola Diego Ribero cosmographo de su magestad, año de 1529, e[n] Sevilla / La cual se devide en dos partes conforme A la capitulacion que hizieron los catholicos Reyes de españa y el rrey don Juan de portogual En Tordesillas Año de 1494 Facsímil realizado en Londres por W. Griggs, hacia 1887 1 mapa en 2 hojas: col.; 58 x 140 cm., hojas 61 x 79 cm y 61 x 66 cm. Nota: "Reproduced from the original in the Museum of the 'Propaganda' in Rome, lent by His Holiness Pope Leo XIII, by W. Griggs, London." En el margen inferior: The second Borgian map by Diego Ribero, Seville 1529
context_page_description: A prime meridian is the meridian in a geographic coordinate system at which longitude is defined to be 0°. Together, a prime meridian and its anti-meridian form a great circle. This great circle divides a spheroid into two hemispheres. If one uses directions of East and West from a defined prime meridian, then they can be called the Eastern Hemisphere and the Western Hemisphere.
  A prime meridian is ultimately arbitrary, unlike an equator, which is determined by the axis of rotation. For Earth's prime meridian, various conventions have been used or advocated in different regions throughout history. The most widely used modern meridian is the IERS Reference Meridian. It is derived but deviates slightly from the Greenwich Meridian, which was selected as an international standard in 1884.
  Longitudes for the Earth and Moon are measured from their prime meridian at 0° to 180° east and to 180° west. For all other Solar System bodies, longitude is measured from 0° to 360°. West longitudes are used if the rotation of the body is direct, that is, it follows the right hand rule. East longitudes are used if the rotation is retrograde.
context_section_description: The notion of longitude was developed by the Greek Eratosthenes (c. 276 BC – c. 195 BC) in Alexandria, and Hipparchus (c. 190 BC – c. 120 BC) in Rhodes, and applied to a large number of cities by the geographer Strabo (64/63 BC – c. 24 AD). But it was Ptolemy (c. AD 90 – c. AD 168) who first used a consistent meridian for a world map in his Geographia.
  Ptolemy used as his basis the "Fortunate Isles", a group of islands in the Atlantic, which are usually associated with the Canary Islands (13° to 18°W), although his maps correspond more closely to the Cape Verde islands (22° to 25° W). The main point is to be comfortably west of the western tip of Africa (17.5° W) as negative numbers were not yet in use. His prime meridian corresponds to 18° 40' west of Winchester (about 20°W) today. At that time the chief method of determining longitude was by using the reported times of lunar eclipses in different countries.
  Ptolemy's Geographia was first printed with maps at Bologna in 1477, and many early globes in the 16th century followed his lead. But there was still a hope that a "natural" basis for a prime meridian existed. Christopher Columbus reported (1493) that the compass pointed due north somewhere in mid-Atlantic, and this fact was used in the important Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494, which settled the territorial dispute between Spain and Portugal over newly discovered lands. The Tordesillas line was eventually settled at 370 leagues (2,193 kilometers, 1,362 statute miles, or 1,184 nautical miles). west of Cape Verde. This is shown in Diogo Ribeiro's 1529 map. São Miguel Island (25.5°W) in the Azores was still used for the same reason as late as 1594 by Christopher Saxton, although by then it had been shown that the zero magnetic deviation line did not follow a line of longitude.
  In 1541, Mercator produced his famous 41 cm terrestrial globe and drew his prime meridian precisely through Fuerteventura (14°1'W) in the Canaries. His later maps used the Azores, following the magnetic hypothesis. But by the time that Ortelius produced the first modern atlas in 1570, other islands such as Cape Verde were coming into use. In his atlas longitudes were counted from 0° to 360°, not 180°W to 180°E as is usual today. This practice was followed by navigators well into the 18th century. In 1634, Cardinal Richelieu used the westernmost island of the Canaries, Ferro, 19° 55' west of Paris, as the choice of meridian. The geographer Delisle decided to round this off to 20°, so that it simply became the meridian of Paris disguised.
  In the early 18th century the battle was on to improve the determination of longitude at sea, leading to the development of the marine chronometer by John Harrison. But it was the development of accurate star charts, principally by the first British Astronomer Royal, John Flamsteed between 1680 and 1719 and disseminated by his successor Edmund Halley, that enabled navigators to use the lunar method of determining longitude more accurately using the octant developed by Thomas Godfrey and John Hadley.
  In the 18th century most countries in Europe adapted their own prime meridian, usually through their capital, hence in France the Paris meridian was prime, in Germany it was the Berlin meridian, in Denmark the Copenhagen meridian, and in United Kingdom the Greenwich meridian.
  Between 1765 and 1811, Nevil Maskelyne published 49 issues of the Nautical Almanac based on the meridian of the Royal Observatory, Greenwich. "Maskelyne's tables not only made the lunar method practicable, they also made the Greenwich meridian the universal reference point. Even the French translations of the Nautical Almanac retained Maskelyne's calculations from Greenwich—in spite of the fact that every other table in the Connaissance des Temps considered the Paris meridian as the prime."
  In 1884, at the International Meridian Conference in Washington, D.C., 22 countries voted to adopt the Greenwich meridian as the prime meridian of the world. The French argued for a neutral line, mentioning the Azores and the Bering Strait, but eventually abstai
caption: Facsimile of Diego Ribeiro's map of 1529; the original is in the Vatican Library.
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