With this in mind, he drew a world map with parallels of latitude that are spaced increasingly far apart as they move away from the equator. The Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator first designed the map style in 1569 as a way of displaying the spherical Earth on a flat, rectangular surface.

Once a staple of school classrooms the world over, the famed Mercator projection has also been the subject of considerable debate and controversy. 'What makes his flat Earth different from other theories is his theory holds that the Earth is imprinted with an 'inverse toroid.'' If you were to take a donut and press it into wet cement and then remove the donut, Bingham explained, the rounded impression it left in the cement would be what is known in mathematics as an inverse toroid.Mercator’s 1569 map-the first to employ his projection style.

Typical of flat Earths, Ferguson's Earth is a rectangular slab, the four corners of which are each guarded by an angel. 'Ferguson was trying to make an updated version of the flat Earth theory to fit the biblical description of the Earth with known facts,' Bingham said. James Bingham, chairman of the museum's board of directors, told us what he knows about it. The other copy is housed in the Pioneer Historical Museum in Hot Springs. So we thought we'd send it to the Library of Congress,' Homuth told Life's Little Mysteries.

I don't want it to fall into the hands of relatives, for God's sake! And I don't particularly want to sell it. He got the map from his eighth grade history teacher in Fargo, N.D., who got it from his grandfather, who lived in Hot Springs, S.D. It's printed on tissue paper and hand-colored with watercolors,' Homuth said.

Ancient map of flat earth