OpenTube

Why is North up?

Map Men

3,720,415 views

📕 Buy the MAP MEN BOOK 'This Way Up - When Maps Go Wrong' https://lnk.to/mapmen

Why is north up? Has north always been up? What used to be up before north was up? Does it matter if a direction other than north is up? And have you ever been on a year five geography trip where you got lost in the woods and wet yourself in front of Mr. Dugdale?

SEE NEW EPISODES EARLY, AND BEHIND-THE-SCENES EXTRAS...
Patreon: mapmen

Written and presented by
JAY FOREMAN Twitter: jayforeman
MARK COOPER-JONES Twitter: markcooperjones

Director/DOP
JADE NAGI Twitter: jade_nagi

Edited by
JAY FOREMAN

Runner
ABBY TIMMS

Additional camera
JOE MURPHY

VFX
CHRIS WALKER https://www.artstation.com/zangrethor...

Maps of Africa
NIKOLAJ JESPER CYON https://www.cyon.se

Upside down UK maps
ALASDAIR RAE Twitter: undertheraedar
@automaticknowledge

Chinese read by
YINGRUI WANG

Master of the Feast by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/...
Source: http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-...
Artist: http://incompetech.com/

20 Comments

@markcooper-jones7494 3 years ago Pinned

It's good to learn, and here are three things we've now learned:

- Tolkein did make a map without North at the top. He's more imaginative than we gave him credit for.
- Lower Egypt is named for being in the lowlands. This is the sort of mistake we consider *embarrassing*.
- Orientated isn't a word. It's oriented. Which sounds worse, but is actually correct. I blame the fact we were incredibly young when we said that.

Thank you for watching, and do stop being cleverer than us.

@Dexausmelmac 3 years ago

Interesting correction, Tolkien DID actually make at least one map with East at the top: Thorin’s map in The Hobbit. Though it is meant to be handed down from his ancestors, so it could be another case of older maps simply being different

@LiminalTub 3 years ago

1:05 Jay really showed a clip from an old episode and expected no one to notice.

@agrvet1 3 years ago

I am a Diagnostic Imager and we are trained to flip chest radiographs upside down to spot rib fractures. It really does help to look at the image with new eyes and spot hidden lesions!

@fish42 1 year ago

0:36 although the lonely mountain map in the Hobbit has East up, “in the fashion of the Dwarves”

@AFGuidesHD 3 years ago

I like how early maps are the blobby ones we draw off the top of our head lol

@Maazin5 3 years ago

7:57 a European drawing boundaries in Africa to show what it would look like if Europeans didn't draw boundaries in Africa

@samuelroveda9706 2 years ago

0:34 - It's intersting, because the map of the dwarves in The Hobbit has a diferent position to the North.

@Azaghal8 3 years ago (edited)

On the topic of Tolkien, he DID actually play around with orientation. Dwarves put East up on their maps (like on Thror's map that Thorin follows in The Hobbit). Also, the fact that the Elvish words for north and south are related to the words for right and left respectively strongly implies that Elves and other peoples influenced by them usually drew maps with West upwards.

Tolkien would likely have said that he put north at the top on his maps of Middle-earth to simplify for the readers (especially since Middle-earth is supposed to be our world in a bygone age)...

@aspzx 3 years ago

Our Australian geography teacher (in the UK) had a poster of an upside down map of the world on the wall. He tried to convince us that was genuinely how Australians did their maps and there it was "correct" as far as he was concerned. He also had a clock that ran anti-clockwise.

@Sonnen_Licht 3 years ago (edited)

Fun fact:
In the past, Chinese people preferred to build houses with their front door facing south, so the North is literally the "back" of the house.
The character for "back" (北) was then used to mean "North" as well.
So that's why "North" in Chinese languages is written 北. It was originally depicting two people turning their back to each other!

@jetblack7342 2 years ago (edited)

Fun fact, a common way to navigate and give directions in Hawaii (on land at least) is mauka and makai, or mountains and ocean. So each island has their own little North Pole that people navigate around.

As for left and right, people typically refer to landmarks like hills or regions. It’s not the east or west side of the field, it’s Diamond Head or Ewa.

Edit: additional fun fact: this has made me absolutely useless at navigating anywhere without a visible mountain or grid system. I regularly get lost in suburbs because my mental north is governed by changes in elevation.

@zoeyriordan4844 3 years ago

Correction about Tolkien, while many of the maps had north to the top, this wasn't due to a lack of imagination. In fact the dwarfs used east for the top of their maps! (At least with the only dwarf made map we've seen, Thror's map)

@cliffwood7386 3 years ago

East being historically "up" makes perfect sense - if you're not navigating by the North star, then you're probably navigating by the sun, which will be in the East in the morning when you start your journey! Something I've never thought to question, but has a very interesting answer.

@EngAnon 3 years ago

When one of my college professors published a book on military history, he specifically commissioned the maps to not have north at the top, so that readers would be forced to actually look at the terrain and other features, rather than just thinking "oh, yeah, that's a map of Western Europe."

@petrified7221 10 months ago

9:40 Them french horn players got lungs made of titanium

@nixtix04 3 years ago

Map Men finally returns after almost 2 years. Excited to see the future episodes, they’re all amazing!

@kkyehh 3 years ago

I really do enjoy how this series combines the whimsy of a children's show with a stark, mature understanding of the world and its issues and this episode is absolutely no different. Here's to another grand batch of Map Men!

@naravxo 3 years ago

This reminds me of why artists "flip the canvas". It's to take a break from looking at the picture for too long and by seeing it from a different perspective, we can spot mistakes we never noticed when working on it.