In 1916, University of Chicago Geography professor
J. Paul Goode noticed that at latitudes of 40o44'1,
points plotted for the Sinusoidal Projection coincide
with points plotted for the Mollweide Projection (also known as the Homolographic
Projection).
So, Professor Goode chopped the middle out of a Mollweide projection
and slid the center part of a Sinusoidal in its place, Sinusoidal filling
in a Mollweide sandwich. The result? An equal-area projection that had
the Sinusoidal's superior representation of shape near the Equator but
the Mollweide's somewhat better representation near the poles.
As a further elaboration, he pieced together a map from little pieces
of open-faced sandwich, centered on various meridians, in order to
minimize the shape distortion of Earth's continents. The resulting
map, which he published in his 1923 Goode's School Atlas2,
resembled an orange peel.
The technique, supposedly patented by Professor Goode, has nonetheless
been reproduced in countless locations. You have almost certainly seen
the orange-peel map. You may also have seen a world map showing
the whole sandwich.
How can you tell? If you look closely at a Goode's Homolosine map near
40o44', you will see that the meridians suddenly kink away from
the center of the map.
Goode's Homolosine is the most useful of the multisuperficial (i.e.,
multi-part) map projections, although it is used solely for world maps.
1The latitude of Salt Lake City, Lincoln, NE, Peoria,
IL, just north of Pittsburgh, PA, New York City and Madrid,
through Naples and Thessaloniki, just south of Istanbul, just north
of Baku, a bit south of Tashkent, somewhat north of Beijing but just
south of Jinzhou, Aomori, brushing the northern coast of Tasmania,
just north of Wellington, New Zealand, just south of Osorno,
Chile.
2Now published by Rand McNally as Goode's World Atlas,
www.goodesatlas.com