Even in the age of Google Earth, people still buy globes
LONDON >> Find a globe in your local library or classroom and try this: Close the eyes, spin it and drop a finger randomly on its curved, glossy surface.
You're likely to pinpoint a spot in the water, which covers 71% of the planet. Maybe you'll alight on a place you've never heard of — or a spot that no longer exists after a war or because of climate change. Perhaps you'll feel inspired to find out who lives there and what it's like. Trace the path of totality ahead of today's solar eclipse. Look carefully, and you'll find the cartouche and the antipode of where you're standing right now.
In the age of Google Earth, watches that triangulate and cars with builtin GPS, there's something about a globe that somehow endures.
London globemaker Peter Bellerby thinks the human yearning to “find our place in the cosmos” has helped globes survive their original purpose — navigation — and the internet. He says it's part of the reason he went into debt making a globe for his father's 80th birthday in 2008. The experience helped inspire his company, and 16 years later is keeping his team of about two dozen artists, cartographers and woodworkers employed.
“You don't go onto Google Earth to get inspired,” Bellerby says in his airy studio, surrounded by dozens of globes in various languages and states of completion. “A globe is very much something that connects you to the planet that wwe live on.”
Beyond the existential and historical appeal, earthly matters such as cost and geopolitics hover over globemaking. 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 is a real question about whether globes — especially handmade orbs — remain relevant as more than works of art and history for those who can afford them.
Joshua Nall, director of the Whipple Museum of the History of Science in Cambridge, says a globe remains a display of “the learning, the erudition, the political interests of its owner.”
Bellerby's globes aren't cheap. They run from about $1,900 for the smallest to six figures for the 50inch Churchill model. He makes about 600 orbs a year of varying size, framing and ornamentation.
Creating them is a complex process that starts with the construction of a sphere and progresses to the application of fragile petal-shaped panels that are fitted together around the sphere's surface. Artists perched around Bellerby's London studio painstakingly blend and apply paint.