tOMOrrOW's AnsWers tODAY - AkzoNobel

16
Everyone of my generation of 50-somethings
will probably remember having a globe at
school. I recall ours stood in the corner of our
geography master’s office – a dented, tinny,
rather cheap looking football-sized sphere with
textured mountains and shiny discolored seas.
A relic perhaps of a time when the sun never set
on the Empire, it looked as if it had seen better days.
Every single one of a constant procession of wayward
schoolboys over the years must have given it a hard,
but surreptitious, spin or traced some imaginary
journey with their grubby fingertips when called to
account in that dark and, for us, forbidding place.
Perched on the corner of the redoubtable Mr.
Smith’s well-worn desk, it must at one time have
symbolized colonial power, but now was a timely, yet
forlorn reminder of the world that lay at our feet and
of a wider universal truth that Copernicus and Galileo
had suffered the wrath of the medieval church to bring
to us – that we live on a world that is not flat, but an
imperfect sphere slowly spinning in space and time.
A truth only officially acknowledged in 1992 when the
Vatican conceded that the Earth was not stationary,
thus pardoning Galileo 500 years after he had upset
the status quo.
The globe’s origins date back to antiquity and the
intellectual curiosity of the ancient Greeks. Hellenistic
philosophers had long speculated about the Earth’s
shape, but finally established that it was spherical and
not flat in the 3rd century BC. Before long, “celestial”
globes depicting the heavens appeared in artwork –
Atlas carrying the heavens on his shoulders for
eternity is an image we all know. In 150 BC, the first
“terrestrial” globe was made by Crates of Mallus. The
oldest surviving globe is the Erdapfel, which was
made by Martin Behaim in Nuremberg, Germany, in
1492, the year Columbus discovered – or rather
stumbled upon –the Americas, earnestly believing
that he had found the gateway to the Orient. Needless
to say, map making was painfully in its infancy.
The 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries were the
golden age for globes – a time when the European
powers were hell bent on carving out huge empires
and the scramble for Africa was at its height. Men
such as Henry Morton Stanley, Pierre Savorgnan de
Brazza, Charles Gordon of Khartoum, Jean-Baptiste
Marchand and Hubert Lyautey tickled the public’s
imagination as they braved unimaginable dangers
among “savage” people for the nation’s greater good.
At home, an information hungry public was fed neverending
stories of derring-do, swashbuckling
adventure and extraordinary feats of valor in the face
of terrifying odds, all of which was accompanied by
detailed maps of their hero’s endeavors. What better
way to trace their progress than with a globe?
Today, while maps abound in the media, online
and for the navigation-savvy owners of smartphones
and in the logos of globally active companies, globes
seem to be about as popular as ceramic ducks on a
living room wall. It would be disingenuous of me to
say I can remember a time when they were a common
sight in offices or houses. Even schools, for a long
time their standard bearer (particularly for explaining
history and geography), no longer have them in the
classroom. Once the centerpiece of our learning
experience, for many they now seem an anachronism
in the modern digital age. So are they on the slippery
slope to oblivion?
Not at all, says Peter Bellerby of Bellerby & Co.
Globemakers. A globe maker since 2008, the
Established in 2008, Peter Bellerby’s
globemaking studio is located in London.
Photography: Jake Curtis.