3D Interactive Globes Now Online: Spin Through an Archive of Globes from the 17th and 18th Century

Willem Janszoon Blaeu Celestial Globe 1602

No matter how accustomed we've grown over the centuries to flat maps of the world, they can never be perfectly accurate. Strictly speaking, no map can perfectly capture the territory it describes (an impossibility memorably fictionalized by Jorge Luis Borges in "On Exactitude in Science"), but there's a reason we also call the Earth "the globe": only a globe can represent not just the planet's true shape, but the true shape of the land masses on which we live. This is not to say that globes have always been accurate. Like the history of mapmaking, the history of globe-making is one of educated (or uneducated) guesses, free mixture of fact and legend, and labels like "terra incognita" or "here be dragons." You can see that for yourself in the British Library's new online historic globe archive — and not just through flat photographs and scans.

Richard Cushee Terrestrial Globe 1730

"The archive presents 3D models of 11 globes — a subset of the library’s historic maps collection — that can be rotated and zoomed into for greater detail at every angle," writes Hyperallergic's Sarah Rose Sharp. She points to one in particular, "stunning 1602 celestial globe by Dutch cartographer Willem Janszoon Blaeu, first produced in 1602. In addition to representing the constellations as their fantastic and mythological namesakes, it identifies a nova in the constellation of Cygnus which Blaeu had personally observed in 1600."

The British Library's digital collection boasts several such "celestial globes," which chart the sky rather than the Earth. However few of us have ever turned a celestial globe by hand, we can now do it virtually. If 1602 seems a bit too vintage, give a digital spin to the others from 1700, 1728, and 1783.

G.Wright & W. Bardin - Terrestrial Globe

Back on land, these globes feature not just "fantastic creatures," Sharp writes, but "charming archaic conceptions of the oceans — the 'Atalantick Ocean' in the 1730 Richard Cushee terrestrial globe, or the 'Ethipoic Ocean' in the 1783 terrestrial globe by G. Wright and W. Bardin." In Chushee, Wright and Bardin's times, few globe-users, or indeed globe-makers, would have had the chance to see much of those vast bodies of water for themselves. Of course, with the current state of pandemic lockdown in so many countries, few of us are taking transoceanic journeys even today. If you're dreaming about the rest of the world, spend some time with the British Library's 3D-modeled globes on Sketchfab — where you'll also find the Rosetta Stone and Bust of Nefertiti among other artifacts previously featured here on Open Culture — and get your hands on an idea of how humanity imagined it in centuries past.

Thomas Tuttell Celestial Globe C1700

via Hyperallergic

Watch the Making of the Dymaxion Globe: A 3-D Rendering of Buckminster Fuller’s Revolutionary Map

Why Making Accurate World Maps Is Mathematically Impossible

The Strikingly Beautiful Maps & Charts That Fired the Imagination of Students in the 1880s

Download 91,000 Historic Maps from the Massive David Rumsey Map Collection

The History of Cartography, “the Most Ambitious Overview of Map Making Ever Undertaken,” Is Free Online

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

3D Interactive Globes Now Online: Spin Through an Archive of Globes from the 17th and 18th Century is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.