A prime meridian is a meridian (a line of longitude) in a geographical coordinate system at

which longitude is defined to be 0. A prime meridian and its opposite in a 360-system, the
180th meridian (at 180 longitude), form a great circle.
This great circle divides the sphere, e.g., the Earth, into two hemispheres. If one uses directions
of East and West from a defined prime meridian, then they can be called Eastern Hemisphere and
Western Hemisphere.
Gerardus Mercator in his Atlas Cosmographicae (1595) uses a prime meridian somewhere close
to 25W, passing just to the west of Santa Maria Island in the Atlantic. His 180th meridian runs
along the Strait of Anin (Bering Strait)
A prime meridian is ultimately arbitrary, unlike an equator, which is determined by the axis of
rotationand various conventions have been used or advocated in different regions and
throughout history.
History
The notion of longitude was developed by the Greek Eratosthenes (c. 276 BC c. 195 BC) in
Alexandria and Hipparchus (c. 190 BC c. 120 BC) in Rhodes and applied to a large number of
cities by the geographer Strabo (64/63 BC c. 24 AD). But it was Ptolemy (c. AD 90 c. AD
168) who first used a consistent meridian for a world map in his Geographia.
Ptolemy used as his basis the "Fortunate Isles", a group of islands in the Atlantic which are
usually associated with the Canary Islands (13 to 18W), although his maps correspond more
closely to the Cape Verde islands (22 to 25 W). The main point is to be comfortably west of the
western tip of Africa (17.5 W) as negative numbers were not yet in use. His prime meridian
corresponds to 18 40' west of Winchester (about 20W) today.[2] At this time the chief method
of determining longitude was by using the reported times of lunar eclipses in different countries.

Ptolemys Geographia was first printed with maps at Bologna in 1477 and many early globes in
the sixteenth century followed his lead. But there was still a hope that a "natural" basis for a

prime meridian existed. Christopher Columbus reported (1493) that the compass pointed due
north somewhere in mid-Atlantic and this fact was used in the important Tordesillas Treaty of
1494 which settled the territorial dispute between Spain and Portugal over newly discovered
lands. The Tordesillas line was eventually settled at 370 leagues west of Cape Verde. This is
shown in Diogo Ribeiro's 1529 map. So Miguel Island (25.5W) in the Azores was still used for
the same reason as late as 1594 by Christopher Saxton, although by this time it had been shown
that the zero deviation line did not follow a line of longitude.
Prime meridian at Greenwich
The modern prime meridian, based at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, was established by Sir
George Airy in 1851.
The position of the Greenwich Meridian has been defined by the location of the Airy transit
circle ever since the first observation was taken with it by Sir George Airy in 1851.[26] Prior to
that, it was defined by a succession of earlier transit instruments, the first of which was acquired
by the second Astronomer Royal, Edmond Halley in 1721. It was set up in the extreme northwest corner of the Observatory between Flamsteed House and the Western Summer House. This
spot, now subsumed into Flamsteed House, is roughly 43 metres to the west of the Airy Transit
Circle, a distance equivalent to roughly 0.15 seconds of time.[16] It was Airy's transit circle that
was adopted in principle (with French delegates, who pressed for adoption of the Paris meridian
abstaining) as the Prime Meridian of the world in 1884.[27][28]
All of these Greenwich meridians were located via an astronomic observation from the surface of
the Earth, oriented via a plumb line along the direction of gravity at the surface. This astronomic
Greenwich meridian was disseminated around the world, first via the lunar distance method, then
by chronometers carried on ships, then via telegraph lines carried by submarine communications
cables, then via radio time signals. One remote longitude ultimately based on the Greenwich
meridian using these methods was that of the North American Datum 1927 or NAD27, an
ellipsoid whose surface best matches mean sea level under the United States.