26Frisland
Frisland was an "imaginary" island off the coast of Greenland that, despite being nonexistent, appeared on virtually all of the maps of the North Atlantic from the 1560s through the 1660s.
27. A fitness tracking app unknowingly revealed locations of secret US army bases. When the app released a map with over 3 million data points, it showed popular running routes. Data shared by soldiers on the app was detailed enough to reveal sensitive information of users on active military service.
28. For decades, cartographers have made secret illustrations on Switzerland's official topographical maps such as a spider, a naked woman, and a marmot, eluding the Swiss Federal Office of Topography for years before removal. The naked woman reclined for nearly 60 yrs in the municipality of Egg.
29. In 1901, a Jesuit professor found Martin Waldseemüller's map of the world which was made in 1507. What makes this map important is the word, "America" printed on the southern continent of the Western Hemisphere. The U.S. Government considers it the "birth certificate of America."
30. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union compiled an ultra meticulous map of Washington DC that is far more detailed than typical city maps we are all familiar with including details like the precise width of roads, the load-bearing capacity of bridges, and location of the water reservoir and pumping stations.
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31300 South Wacker Drive
To pep up the look of a bland 70s Chicago office building, a design firm 2013 added a 400-foot-tall map of the city. The modernistic 35-story map is all gray and black except for the representation of the host building (300 S Wacker Drive) which is shown in red and lights up at night.
32. The naming of the North & South America continent in honor of Amerigo Vespucci was the result of a mistake by a German cartographer while making a map of the world in 1507 who thought Vespucci rather than Columbus was the explorer who discovered America after reading a document called Mundus Novus.
33. The world's shortest mountain, Mt. Tenpo, is 20 m tall. It's only a mountain because it was described as one on a topographical map put out by the Geographical Survey Institute of Japan. You can even get a certificate for summitting the mountain at a nearby cafe.
34. Canada, Russia, and Greenland aren't nearly as big as most of us think. Most of us have learned world geography from a Mercator map, which distorts the true size of certain countries because it depicts a 3D sphere as a 2D rectangle.
35. Agloe, New York is a fictional town that became an actual landmark after mapmakers made up the community as a phantom settlement, an example of a "copyright trap" and were put onto the map to catch plagiarism as it appears only on their map and not on any others.
