We could start this article nicely with ‘have you ever noticed that’, but that would of course be nonsense. Even if you’ve taken a long road trip through the western US, you won’t necessarily have noticed that the roads are often not quite straight. Often every few kilometers there is suddenly a kink or a slight bend. And that’s quite interesting.
In 1785, President Thomas Jefferson divided the American West into a bunch of little one-mile squares. On the basis of this grid he was able to divide pieces of land. The problem with this approach is that the grid of square boxes was drawn on a flat map. And it seems that the earth is not as flat as many people think.
If you printed a checkerboard on a piece of paper and folded it around a football, the lines would no longer be straight, but would run with a curve. To ensure that the straight grid still worked on the world map, there are grid corrections introduced. The surfaces are offset slightly so that straight surfaces can still be used on a convex surface.
The Dutch artist Gerco de Ruijter made a book and a video of this special appearance a few years ago. Of course, no real lines have been drawn in the US to indicate the distribution of the land, but there are roads along the grid. And you see these roads jumping every few kilometers. Check it out in the video below.
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