Globe

The oldest surviving celestial globe sits atop the Farnese Atlas, carved in the 2nd century Roman Empire.

A globe is the only representation of the Earth that does not distort either the shape or the size of large features – land masses, bodies of water, etc.

Many terrestrial globes have one celestial feature marked on them: a diagram called the analemma, which shows the apparent motion of the Sun in the sky during a year.

This capability also permits exploring the Earth from different orientations to help counter the north-up bias caused by conventional map presentation.

[5] The sphericity of the Earth was established by Greek astronomy in the 3rd century BC, and the earliest terrestrial globe appeared from that period.

[6][7] The earliest known example is the one constructed by Crates of Mallus in Cilicia (now Çukurova in modern-day Turkey), in the mid-2nd century BC.

[9][10] During the Middle Ages in Christian Europe, while there are writings alluding to the idea that the earth was spherical, no known attempts at making a globe took place before the fifteenth century.

[11] The earliest extant terrestrial globe was made in 1492 by Martin Behaim (1459–1537) with help from the painter Georg Glockendon.

China made many mapping advancements such as sophisticated land surveys and the invention of the magnetic compass.

A similar grapefruit-sized globe made from two halves of an ostrich egg was found in 2012 and is believed to date from 1504.

Stefaan Missine, who analyzed the globe for the Washington Map Society journal Portolan, said it was "part of an important European collection for decades.

[15] Globus IMP, electro-mechanical devices including five-inch globes have been used in Soviet and Russian spacecraft from 1961 to 2002 as navigation instruments.

[16] Traditionally, globes were manufactured by gluing a printed paper map onto a sphere, often made from wood.

In the 1800s small pocket globes (less than 3 inches) were status symbols for gentlemen and educational toys for rich children.