This 1954 map is the first representation of the Dymaxion map, as conceived by Richard Buckminster Fuller and drawn by Shoji Sadao.
The history of the Dymaxion map, also known as the Fuller projection, began in 1943, when Fuller published an essay in the magazine Life in which he introduced a new projection in which the Earth's surface was adapted to a cuboctahedron (14-sided polyhedron, 6 squares and 8 triangles) and then unfolded onto a plane.
Eleven years later, in 1954, Fuller and Sadao created this new projection, the Dymaxion map, in which the Earth's surface was adapted to an icosahedron (a polyhedron with 20 triangular faces). Unlike other projections, this one is designed exclusively to illustrate the entire map of the Earth. The great advantage is that it allows the icosahedron to be developed in different ways depending on which triangles are to be placed together.
The projection that groups all continents together, used in this 1954 map, is the most common of all. Since this projection does not allow latitudes to be easily identified, the authors chose to use different colours for land masses depending on their latitude, with greens for polar latitudes and reds for equatorial latitudes.
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