Every map tells a lie, but good maps use the right projection to tell specific truths. This is "Get to Know a Projection," a Map Lab series that shows you all the different ways to unround the Earth.

When this world map was charted in the 1600s according to the Mercator’s projection, the idea was that ships could use the lines of longitude and latitude as a from of navigation.

Fuller's followers carried the Dymaxion torch blindly for decades, until Gene Keyes revived the debate in 1975 by refining the map a bit into the Cahill-Keyes projection.

The projection keeps parallels (circles of latitude) and meridians (lines of longitude) straight and perpendicular to each other, which was vital for 16th century navigators.

For instance, the most common type of map is called the Mercator projection, which stretches the poles and shrinks the equatorial regions to create fixed lines of longitude and latitude.

Extra: The projection you created is similar to the Mercator projection frequently used to create world maps. Find a Mercator projection world map and compare the size of North America and Africa.

This article was originally published on Nov. 3, 2016. Our maps have been lying to us for centuries. The standard classroom maps we all learned geography from are based on the Mercator projection, a ...

And different projections distort maps in different ways. The Mercator projection depicts Greenland as larger than Africa. But, in reality, Africa is 14 times the size of Greenland.

I have always loved geometrical things. As a kid I was fascinated by map projections. When I was 14, I made a painted globe of Mars based on a flat Mercator Mars map by the astronomer E. M. Antoniadi.

This article was originally published on Nov. 3, 2016. Our maps have been lying to us for centuries. The standard classroom maps we all learned geography from are based on the Mercator projection, a ...