Was latitude or longitude lines discovered first?

Answer 1

Longitude lines were discovered first. The Viking explorers crossed so many of them

that they couldn't help noticing as they crossed them. They eventually learned to

count the lines as they slipped noiselessly under the keel of their boat, and thereby

to gauge their eastward/westward progress on their many voyages in both directions

between their homelands and what was to later become North America.

With the rise of the popularity of thinking, and the growth in numbers of those who

enjoyed it so much that they never actually went anywhere or did anything, there

arose among them a theoretical hypothetical philosophical question: Considering

the density and regularity of the by-now-familiar lines of longitude, could it be that

an entirely new and perpendicular set of lines existed, perfectly orthogonal to the

known set, which had never been noticed simply because the seafarers of the time

had not yet crossed any ?

Expeditions of investigation and experiment were mounted, staffed mainly by

lower-case vikings who loved to sail in the abstract but were petrified of losing

sight of land. These were the ones largely written off by the true explorers, the

ones who had never earned their second horn, and never sailed more than a

few bathtubwidths from any west coast. They were the ones most motivated

to accomplish something ... anything ... that involved sailing but did not require

following the setting sun. They were enlisted, supplied, provisioned, and chartered

to put to sea, then to keep the coast at their left hand and the Pole Star at their

back, to sail until their lutefisk melted and turned green, and all the while to keep

watch over the gunwales for lines that might cross their path.

The results, of course, were at once both instantaneous and historic, as these

erstwhile Norsk nebishes brought back their tales of great numbers of lines, thickets

of lines, tangles of lines, all new, and every one perpendicular to all of the heretofore

familiar ones.

Those, we know now, were the lines of latitude, unknown until the dreamers began

to search for them, and finally found, hundreds of years after the longitude lines.