LONDON (AP) - Find a globe in your local library or classroom and try this: Close eyes, spin it and randomly drop a finger on the curved, shiny surface.
You will probably point to a spot in the water that covers 71% of the planet. Maybe you end up in a place you've never heard of - or in a place that no longer exists after a war or because of climate change. Maybe you'll be inspired to discover who lives there and what it's like. Follow the path of totality ahead of Monday's solar eclipse. Look closely and you will find the cartouche - the globemaker's signature - and the opposite (look it up) of where you are now standing.
In the age of Google Earth, triangular watches and cars with built-in GPS, there's something about a globe - a spherical representation of the world in miniature - that somehow endures.
London globemaker Peter Bellerby thinks the human desire to "find our place in the cosmos" has helped globes survive their original purpose - navigation - and the Internet. He says this is one of the reasons he got into debt by making a globe for his father's 80th birthday in 2008. The experience inspired his company, and sixteen years later he keeps his team of about twenty artists, cartographers and woodworkers working.
"You don't go to Google Earth to get inspiration," says Bellerby in his airy studio, surrounded by dozens of globes in different languages and states of completion. "A globe is very much something that connects you to the planet we live on."
Or, as the Scottish-born American explorer John Muir wrote in 1915: "If we regard the whole globe as one great dewdrop, striped and studded with continents and islands, flying through space while other stars all sing and shine together as one , universe appears as an infinite storm of beauty."
BUILDING A SPHERE IN THE MIDDLE OF BREAKING CHANGES?
Beyond the existential and historical appeal, mundane issues like cost and geopolitics hang over globe-making. Bellerby says his company has experience working with customs officials in regions with disputed borders such as India, China, North Africa and the Middle East.
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And there is a real question as to whether globes - especially handmade orbs - remain relevant as more than works of art and history for those who can afford them. After all, they are snapshots of the past - of the way their clients and creators saw the world at a given moment. So they are inherently inaccurate representations of a planet that is constantly moving.
"Do globes play a relevant role in our time? If so, in my opinion it is due to their appearance as a three-dimensional body, the difficult to control desire to rotate them and the attractiveness of their card image," says Jan Mokre, vice president of the International Coronelli Association for the Study of Globes in Vienna. "Perhaps a certain nostalgia effect also plays a role, just as old cars and mechanical watches still have a certain appeal to people."
Joshua Nall, director of the Whipple Museum of the History of Science in Cambridge, says a globe remains a testament to "the knowledge, erudition and political interests of its owner."
"Unfortunately, I think the use of the globe is likely to decline, perhaps especially in the school environment, where digital technologies are taking over," Nall says. 'I think they may now become more items of overt prestige. They are bought as show objects to look beautiful, which of course they always have been."
HOW, AND HOW MUCH?
Bellerby's globes are not cheap. They run from about 1,290 British pounds (about $1,900) for the smallest up to six figures for the 50-inch Churchill model. He makes about 600 orbs a year of different sizes, frames and decorations.
Making it is a complex process that begins with the construction of a sphere and progresses to the use of fragile petal-shaped panels, called 'gores', which are attached together around the surface of the sphere. Artists around Bellerby's London studio meticulously mix and apply paint: dreamy cobalt and mint for the oceans, yellow, green and ocher for the landscape.
The images painted on the spheres range from constellations to mountains and sea creatures. And here, The Associated Press can confirm that they are dragons.
WHO IS BUYING A BULB NOW?
Bellerby won't name the clients, but he says they come from more socio-economic strata than you might think - from families to corporations and heads of state. Private art collectors come by. Filmmakers do that too.
Bellerby says in his book that the company made four globes for the 2011 film "Hugo." One globe is featured in the 2023 film "Tetris," including one, a freestanding, straight-legged Galileo model, which is prominently featured is in a scene.
And yes, some of the richest people in the world buy them. The family of the chairman of the German tool and hardware company, Reinhold Wurth, gave him a Churchill, the largest model, for his 83rd birthday. It is now on display at the Museum Wurth 2 in Berlin.
His granddaughter, Maria Wurth, says in an Instagram video that the piece highlights the history of the company and the magnate's travels.
A 'POLITICAL MINEFIELD'
There is no international standard for a correctly drawn Earth. Countries, like people, look at the world differently, and some are very sensitive to the way their territory is depicted. If you insult them with "wrongly" drawn borders on a globe, you risk having the globes confiscated at customs.
"Globemaking," Bellerby writes, "is a political minefield."
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 labels disputed borders as disputed: "We cannot change or rewrite history."
Speaking of history, here's the 'potato'
Scientists since ancient times, the famous Plato and Aristotle, stated that the Earth is not flat, but closer to a sphere. (To be precise, it's a spheroid - bulging at the equator, squashed at the poles).
No one knows when the first earth was created. But the oldest known example dates from 1492. No one in Europe knew of the existence of North or South America at the time.
It is called the 'Erdapfel', which translates to 'potato' or 'potato'. The orb was created by German navigator and geographer Martin Behaim, who worked for the King of Portugal, according to the Whipple Museum in Cambridge. more than just the cartographic information known at the time, but also details such as raw materials abroad, marketplaces and local trade protocols.
It is also an account of a difficult time.
"The Behaim Globe is today a central document of European world conquest and the Atlantic slave trade," according to the German National Museum's web page on display there. In the 15th century, the museum notes, "Africa would not only be circumnavigated in search of India, but also developed economically.
"The globe makes clear how much the creation of our modern world was based on the violent appropriation of resources, the slave trade and plantation agriculture," the museum notes, or "the first phase of European subjugation and division of the world." "
TWIN GLOBES FOR CHURCHILL AND ROOSEVELT DURING WWII
If you have a globe of any kind, you're in good company. During World War II, two in particular were commissioned for leaders on either side of the Atlantic, as symbols of power and partnership.
For Christmas 1942, the United States delivered gigantic double globes to American President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. They had a diameter of 150 centimeters and each weighed hundreds of kilos, probably the largest and most accurate globes of the time.
It took more than fifty geographers, cartographers, and government draftsmen to gather the information to create the globe, built by the Weber Costello Company of Chicago Heights, Illinois.
The Roosevelt globe is now in the Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, NY, and Churchill's globe is in Chartwell House, the Churchill family home in Kent, England, according to the U.S. Library of Congress.
In theory, the leaders could use the spheres simultaneously to formulate war strategies. "In reality," Bellerby writes, "the gift of the globes was a simple PR exercise, an important weapon in modern warfare."
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Laurie Kellman is a member of AP's Trends and Culture team, with a focus on global affairs. Follow her up http://www.twitter.com/APLaurieKellman
