Martin Waldseemüller (c. 1470 – 16 March 1520) was a German cartographer and humanist scholar. Sometimes known by the Hellenized form of his name, Hylacomylus, his work was influential among contemporary cartographers. His collaborator Matthias Ringmann and he are credited with the first recorded usage of the word America to name a portion of the New World in honour of Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci, coming from the Old High German name Emmerich, in a world map they delineated in 1507. Waldseemüller was also the first to map South America as a continent separate from Asia, the first to produce a printed globe, and the first to create a printed wall map of Europe. A set of his maps printed as an appendix to the 1513 edition of Ptolemy's Geography is considered to be the first example of a modern atlas.
The 1507 wall map was lost for a long time, but a copy was found in Schloss Wolfegg in southern Germany by Joseph Fischer in 1901. It is the only known copy and was purchased by the United States Library of Congress in May 2003.[19] Five copies of Waldseemüller's globular map survive in the form of "gores": printed map sections that were intended to be cut out and pasted onto a wooden globe.
An excerpt from, "Maps That Changed Our World" By Julie Stoner, Rodney Hardy, and Craig Bryant, Library of Congress:
Johann Gutenberg’s mechanical printing press and the development of woodcut and engraving techniques ensured the preservation and wide distribution of this new information. In 1507, 15 years after Columbus' first voyage, German cartographer, Martin Waldseemüller, changed the map-making world forever.
Martin Waldseemüller’s 1507 world map grew out of an ambitious project in St. Dié, France, during the first decade of the sixteenth century. The objective was to document and update new geographic knowledge derived from the discoveries of the late fifteenth and the first years of the sixteenth centuries.
The importance of this map lies in the fact that it is the first map to use the name "America" and recognize it as a separate continent. Waldseemüller christened the new lands “America” in recognition of Amerigo Vespucci’s understanding that a new continent had been uncovered, as a result of the voyages of Columbus and other explorers in the late 15th century. It also shows the Pacific Ocean which had not been done before. Coast lines, land masses, and lines of latitude and longitude can also be seen.
An excerpt from, "Martin Waldseemuller’s secret knowledge" By Joel Achenbach, Washington Post, May 16, 2013:
You surely recognize the name of Martin Waldseemuller. He’s the German mapmaker whose 1507 map of the world was the first to use the name “America” for the New World (he placed it on South America; North America is an attenuated land mass labeled Terra Ultra Incognita). “America” is the feminized (per map protocol) version of Americus, the Latin for Amerigo Vespucci, the Italian explorer who had canvassed South America’s Atlantic coastline in several voyages circa 1500. Waldseemuller made 1,000 copies of the map, supposedly, but only one survived, and it was lost for 350 years until someone in 1901 found it in a castle in Europe. The Library of Congress bought this map — the “birth certificate” of America, some say — for $10 million about a decade ago, and you can see it in the protective dim light of a specially constructed display case in the Jefferson Building, alongside another Waldseemuller map from 1516, plus several other maps that are on exhibit through June 22.
. . .As my colleague David Brown noted in a 2008 article, the 1507 Waldseemuller map is rather mysterious, for he seems to know things that the textbooks would suggest he couldn’t have known.
For example, he shows South America as a continent, and depicts a Pacific Ocean, even though it’s hard to fathom how the existence of that ocean got to Waldseemuller in the European interior that early in the Age of Discovery. Not until 1513 did Balboa make what was officially the first European discovery of the Pacific, after he crossed the isthmus of Panama.
