This map was created by illustrator Antonio Petruccelli for Alcoa, a major American company in the aluminium industry. It was published in 1943 to promote the importance of aeroplanes as a means of transport.
Despite being an illustration published during the Second World War, the map makes hardly any reference to the conflict, focusing instead on the importance of showing that the world can be depicted using multiple projections and the importance of using an equidistant azimuthal projection to better understand aircraft trajectories. In other words, it seeks a simpler way to understand the geodesic lines.
The central part shows the world with an equidistant azimuthal projection. The left-hand column provides a brief explanation of how different projections are drawn. The right-hand side focuses on the importance of aluminium in aeroplanes and the future of commercial aviation. The back of this poster provides much more detail about the different parts of aeroplanes that are made of aluminium and about the great future of aviation.
You can read more about map projections in this newsletter article: Cartographic projections: distorting the Earth in order to represent it
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