eli5 How did people draw maps before satellites?
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Measuring or rather estimating distance via time travelled and star constellations. Thus older maps were inaccurate at times.
imagine you want to draw a picture of your neighborhood, but you can’t fly up in the sky to see everything. So, you walk around, count your steps to know how far things are, look at big trees or buildings as landmarks, and use the sun to tell which way is which. Then, you draw what you see and make your map based on all these things. That’s how people made maps before satellites helped us. The maps made in the past weren’t as accurate.
Depends on the era and culture. Some cartographers made some wild guesses at times.
First nations/native American people as an unconventional example made something that functioned as a map by beading bands that could be interpreted like instructions based on landmarks.
Carefully and laboriously. This is the task of surveyors; to take careful distance, bearing and elevation measurements between fixed points and so build up an overall picture. Lots of hilltops in the UK for example have triangulation “trig” points on the top which were used by Ordnance Survey to site measuring instruments and so get accurate bearings to lots of visible landmarks (other hilltops, church spires etc). If you can see several of those landmarks from another trig point then you can draw two bearings on a map and where the lines cross is where the landmark is. Continue this process across a large area and hey presto you have a map!
The height of for example Everest was measured in this way: they started at the sea and measured from point to point all the way up until they could see the top, which is many hundreds of miles from the sea.
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