Synchronoptic World History
Arno Peters was born in Berlin in 1916 and educated there at the University of Berlin, where he studied history, the history of art and journalism. He received his PhD from the University of Berlin but he never held public office, working instead as a private scholar from 1941 onwards. In 1974 he co-founded the Institut für Universalgeschichte (Institute for Universal History) in Bremen, of which he became head and where he worked on his historical and geographical cartographical presentations, and on his theories of history. He was awarded an honorary professorship from the University of Bremen, and received many other accolades. Peters was best known for his map, the Peters World Map, which brought him worldwide notoriety in the wake of its introduction at a press conference in Germany in 1974. The map, which was first published in an English-language version in 1983, became one of the most heavily debated images of the world, avoiding as it does the distortions of the Mercator projection, but at the cost of certain compressions of its own. The guiding doctrine that ran through his thinking on history, cartography, politics and economics alike, is summed up by the word "equality". His passionate belief in giving all an equal chance would seem innocent enough, but it was Peters's insistence on applying it in the face of well-established bigotry in a number of different disciplines that brought him enemies and not a little misunderstanding. Peters maintained a steadfast equanimity steadfastly in the face of criticism. Peters extended his concept of equality in mapping with the publication of the Peters Atlas of the World, which was first published in Britain in 1989 and went on to appear in versions in German, Danish, French, Italian, Spanish, and in the United States in the following year. It remains the only world atlas that shows all land areas at the same scale, regardless of their perceived importance, including uninhabited areas such as the Antarctic. Peters's chief publication outside cartography was his Synchronoptische Weltgeschichte (Synchronoptic World History) published in Germany in 1952. It is a chronological chart in which each century from 3000BC is given equal space on the page. Peters's originality also extended to musical notation, where in an age of colour printing he viewed the use of black and white as unnecessarily restrictive. He invented a new notation using a different colour for each note on the scale, opening the world of music to many who thought they could never appreciate it. But established tradition proved too strong and the method was not widely adopted. Arno Peters, cartographer, historian, and visionary died in Bremen on December 2, 2002 at the age of 86. -- Excerpted from the London Times - Obituary - December 10, 2002
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