“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.
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.
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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
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.
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