| If it's the history of surveying land for land use then it starts in documented history with the Egyptians marking out growing land that floods every year and was restaked with string and sight from above the flood level monuments. If it's cartography, the two were intertwined (with differences). Before WGS84 there were tens of state level ellipsoids and hundreds of global datums - with more than a few readjustments on the way to global unification. One book, of many on the cartography side is Flattening the Earth Two Thousand Years of Map Projections - John P. Snyder https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/F/bo363285... who formulated the sinusoidal US space projection seen in war room move scenes showing global maps with S tracks across them for satellite paths. On the dull and technical side (a lot of truncated Taylor series and a couple of projections using <gasp!> complex numbers) see: Map projections: A working manual - also Snyder (free download for PDF & wallchart) https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/pp1395 |