Goode, J. Paul (1862–1932)

John Paul Goode played a key role in the development of 20th-century American cartography. Born in Minnesota in 1862, Goode received his bachelor's degree from the University of Minnesota in 1889 and taught at the Minnesota Normal School in Moorhead from 1889 to 1898. In 1901, he completed his doctorate in economics at the University of Pennsylvania, and he subsequently played an important role in the cultivation of the nascent subdiscipline of economic geography, then called “commercial geography.” He taught geography at the University of Pennsylvania from 1903 to 1917 and at the University of Chicago (then a leading center of geography) from 1917 to 1928, where he taught a variety of courses, including cartography and graphics. Indeed, he is occasionally called the first true American academic cartographer; his students included Henry Leppard and Edward Espenshade. Goode was interested in advancing geographic education in a variety of respects and published widely on the topic. He also served as an “expert investigator” of the Chicago Harbor and for harbors in other cities.

Figure 1 Goode's Interrupted Homolisine projection. This famous projection preserved the relative sizes of places by revealing them in a series of disconnected parts.

Goode contributed to geography and related disciplines in several respects, including coediting the Journal of Geography from 1901 to 1904, helping organize and head the Geographical Society of Chicago, and serving as General Secretary of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1907–1908. He was a founding member of the Association of American Geographers in 1904 and served as its president in 1926–1927, giving as his presidential address a talk titled “The Map as a Record of Progress in Geography.”

Goode was well-known for his opposition to the widely used Mercator projection, particularly for its areal distortion at high latitudes, a problem that prompted him famously to label it the “evil Mercator.” In response, in 1916, he famously combined two other projections, the equal-area Homolographic (or Mollweide) and the Sinusoidal, which Goode noticed coincided at roughly 40°44’ latitude, to invent the Goode Interrupted Homolosine projection, a quasi-cylindrical view that depicted the globe in irregular joined parts, yielding a “peeled-orange” effect (Figure 1). By placing the interruptions over the oceans, the map could reveal continents relatively well; later, Goode made a similar map emphasizing global water space. The result effectively combined the Sinusoidal's superior representation of equatorial regions with the Mollweide's better view of polar areas. Unlike the Mercator, this approach preserved proportionate areal sizes, and it became widely popular for the representation of global thematic distributions. Goode was criticized at [Page 1352]times, however, for not positioning the United States in the center of the map, as was the custom at the time. He also developed the polar equal-area projection in 1928.

Goode also became widely known for initiating and editing Goode's School Atlas, later renamed Goode's World Atlas, which first appeared in 1922. Originally designed for use in schools, where it became a standard text in high schools and colleges, it also became enormously popular among the lay public. Over the following decades, often edited by his students, it reappeared in more than 21 editions to become one of the most commonly used atlases in the world, greatly accelerating the popularity of thematic cartography and powerfully influencing the geographic imagination of millions of people.

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