Matthew Fontaine Maury

person · earth

American naval officer (14 January 1806 – 1 February 1873) who ran the US Navy's Depot of Charts and Instruments and the Naval Observatory from 1844 to 1861, and who turned ships' logbooks into the first systematic maps of winds and currents. He issued the Wind and Current Chart of the North Atlantic in 1847, organised the international maritime conference at Brussels in August 1853 that standardised how merchant and naval ships recorded weather and ocean observations, and published The Physical Geography of the Sea in 1855 — commonly described as the first textbook of modern oceanography. He is also the origin of a durable error: the claim that the Gulf Stream is what makes northwest Europe mild is traced to him, and was still being repeated a century and a half later.

A person is not a place. Drawing it on a map would assert something about the world that no stored fact supports.