Geodetic grids in authoritative maps – new findings about the origin of the UTM Grid

Abstract

Recent discoveries of Wehrmacht Maps in the Military Archive of the Federal Archive of Germany in Freiburg im Breisgau raised the motivation for further investigations into the history of the internationally employed Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM) projection which actually represents a prerequisite for the global use of Global Positioning System (GPS) – and thus of any type of navigation – instruments. In contrast to the frequently stated opinion that this map projection was first operationally used by U.S. Americans it turned out that presumably the first operational maps with indication of the orthogonal UTM grid were produced by German Wehrmacht officers prior to the post World War (WW) II triumph of this projection. Based on the authors´ recent discoveries this article reveals some hitherto hardly known facts concerning the history of cartography of the 1940s.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 13 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.