Eli5 why there are more lines of Longitude then Latitude
In: 35
In theory, one could have decided that the the South Pole was 0° with the equator being 90° and the North Pole being 180° (or vice versa). But that didn’t make sense for several reasons: there would be no logical delineation of which hemisphere one was in while the equator and poles could easily be determined mathematically ( even though the poles had not yet been discovered at the time these conventions were decided) and most of the time for navigation one is working in one hemisphere so it’s simpler to start at 0° at the equator and go 90° North or South.
Similarly, there could have been 360° of longitude instead of 180° east and west but again, it was more practical to assign lines of longitude as East or West starting at the Prime Meridian; which could have been anywhere such as Paris or Washington but Greenwich was settled upon because of the primacy of British sea power at the time and the Naval Observatory’s advances in determining longitude at sea.
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