by LONDON (AP) – Find a globe in your local library or classroom and try this: Close your eyes, turn it and drop a finger randomly on its curved, glossy surface.
You’ll probably end up in water, which covers 71% of the planet. You might land in a place you’ve never heard of – or a place that no longer exists after war or climate change. You might feel inspired to find out who lives there and what it’s like. Trace the path of totality before Monday’s solar eclipse. Look carefully, and you will find the cartouche – the signature of the globe maker – and the antipode (see it ) of where you are currently standing.
In the age of Google Earth, triangulating watches and cars with built-in GPS, there is something about a globe – a spherical representation of the world in miniature – that somehow endures.
London-based globetrotter Peter Bellerby thinks the human desire to “find our place in the cosmos” helped globes survive their original purpose — navigation — and the internet. He says part of the reason he went into debt was making a globe for his father’s 80th birthday in 2008. This experience helped inspire his company, and 16 years later his team of about two dozen artists, cartographers and workers he employed wood.
“You don’t go to Google Earth for inspiration,” says Bellerby in his airy studio, surrounded by dozens of globes in various languages and states of completion. “A globe is something that connects you to the planet we live on.”
Or, as the Scottish American explorer John Muir wrote in 1915: “When we look at the whole world as one great dew, streaked with continents and islands, flying through space with other stars all singing and shining together as one. the universe appears as an endless storm of beauty.”
BUILDING A GLOBAL AFTER A BREAKNECK CHANGE?
Beyond the historic and historical appeal, global considerations such as cost and geopolitics weigh on the creation of domes. Bellerby says his company has experience with customs officials in regions with disputed borders such as India, China, North Africa and the Middle East.
And there’s a real question about whether orbs – especially handmade orbs – are still relevant as more than works of art and history to those who can afford them. After all, they are pictures of the past — of how their patrons and makers saw the world at a certain point in time. As such, they are a fundamentally inaccurate representation of a planet in constant flux.
“Do globes play a relevant role in our time? If so, then in my opinion, this is due to their appearance as a three-dimensional body, the difficult desire to control them to turn, and the attractiveness of their map image,” says Jan Mokre, vice president of the International. Coronelli Society for the Study of Globes in Vienna. “Perhaps a certain nostalgia effect also plays a role, just as old cars and mechanical watches always have a certain appeal to people.”
Joshua Nall, Director of the Whipple Museum of the History of Science in Cambridge, says that a globe is still a reflection of “the learning, the appreciation, the political interests of its owner.”
“Sadly, I think the use of the globe is probably declining, perhaps especially in the school environment, where digital technologies are taking over,” says Nall. “I think now they are perhaps becoming more items with an overt prestige. They’re being bought as display pieces to look pretty, which of course they always have been.”
HOW, AND HOW MUCH?
Bellerby globes are not cheap. They run from about 1,290 British pounds (about $1,900) for the smallest to six figures for a 50-inch Churchill model. He makes about 600 orbs a year of various sizes, framing and decoration.
Creating them is a complex process that begins with the construction of a sphere and progresses to the application of fragile petal-shaped panels, called “gores,” that are fitted together around the surface of the sphere. Artists based around Bellerby’s studio in London carefully blend and apply paint – dreamy cobalt and mint for the oceans, yellow, green and ocher for the landscape.
The images painted on the globes run the gamut, from constellations to mountains and sea creatures. And here, the Associated Press can confirm, be dragons.
WHO BUYS A GLOBAL THESE DAYS?
Bellerby won’t name clients, but says they come from more socioeconomic levels than you might think – from families to businesses to heads of state. Private art collectors come calling. So do filmmakers.
Bellerby says in his book that the company made four globes for the 2011 film, “Hugo.” One globe featured in the 2023 film “Tetris,” including one, a free-standing, straight-legged Galileo model, has a prominent feature in view.
And yes, some of the richest people on the planet buy them. The family of the chairman of the German tool and hardware company Reinhold Wurth Churchill gave him, the largest model, for his 83rd birthday. It is now on display at the Wurth Museum 2 in Berlin.
His granddaughter, Maria Wurth, says in an Instagram video that this piece highlights the history of the company and the magnate’s travels.
‘POLITICAL MINERALS’
There is no international standard for a correctly drawn world. Countries, like people, see the world differently, and some are extremely sensitive about how their territory is portrayed. The risk of being convicted of “incorrectly” drawn limits on a globe is that the orbs will be confiscated by customs.
“The dome is a political minefield,” Bellerby wrote.
China does not recognize Taiwan as a country. Morocco does not recognize Western Sahara. India’s northern border is disputed. Many Arab countries, such as Lebanon, do not recognize Israel.
Bellerby says the company is saying they have disputed boundaries: “We can’t change or rewrite history.”
Speaking of history, here’s the ‘EARTH Apple’
Scientists since then, famously Plato and Aristotle, suggested that the earth is not flat but closer to a sphere. (More precisely, it is a spheroid – bulging at the equator, compressed at the poles).
No one knows when the first earth was created. But the oldest surviving one dates to 1492. No one in Europe knew that North or South America existed at the time.
It’s called the “Erdapfel,” which translates to “land apple” or “potato.” The orb was made by the German navigator and geographer Martin Behaim, who was working for the king of Portugal, according to the Whipple Museum in Cambridge. more than the cartographic information known at that time, but also details such as overseas commodities, market places and local trade protocols.
It is also a record of troubled times.
“The Behaim Globe is today a central document of European world conquest and the Atlantic slave trade,” according to the German National Museum’s worldwide web page, which is on display there. In the 15th century, the museum notes, “Africa was not only to be circumnavigated in search of India, but also for economic development.
“The globe makes clear how much the creation of our modern world was based on the violent appropriation of raw materials, the slave trade and plantation farming,” the museum notes, or “the first stage of and of the division of the European world. “
A FEW GROUNDS FOR CHURCHILL AND ROSE DURING WWII
If you have any kind of globe, you are in good company. During the Second World War, two in particular were commissioned for leaders on the other side of the Atlantic as a symbol of power and partnership.
For Christmas in 1942, the United States delivered a pair of giant globes to American president Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. They were 50 inches in diameter and weighed hundreds of pounds each, believed to be the largest and most accurate globes of the time.
It took more than 50 government geographers, cartographers, and draftsmen to compile the information to make the globe, which was built by the Weber Costello Company of Chicago Heights, Illinois.
Roosevelt’s globe is now located at the Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, NY, and Churchill’s globe is at Chartwell House, the Churchill family home in Kent, England, according to the US Library of Congress.
In theory, the leaders could use the globes simultaneously to formulate a war strategy. “In reality, however,” wrote Bellerby, “the gift of the globe was a simple PR exercise, an important weapon in modern warfare.”
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Laurie Kellman is a member of the AP’s Trends and Culture team, with a focus on global affairs. Follow her at http://www.twitter.com/APlaurieKellman
