The Kid Should See This

Globe Making (1955) – British Pathé

Skilled British artisans in this North London globe making workshop would painstakingly create 60,000 world globes every year. This awesome 1955 film from British Pathé showcases their step-by-step process. Wikipedia also has more on globe history and how globes are made:


The most common type has long, thin gores (strips) of paper that narrow to a point at the poles, small disks cover over the inevitable irregularities at these points. The more gores there are, the less stretching and crumpling is required to make the paper map fit the sphere.

Modern globes are often made from thermoplastic. Flat, plastic disks are printed with a distorted map of one of the Earth’s Hemispheres. This is placed in a machine which molds the disk into a hemispherical shape. The hemisphere is united with its opposite counterpart to form a complete globe.

A globe is usually mounted at a 23.5° angle on a meridian. In addition to making it easy to use, this mounting also represents the angle of the planet in relation to its sun and the spin of the planet. This makes it easy to visualize how days and seasons change.

Watch more map videos and more vids from British Pathé, the United Kingdom’s newsreel archive from 1910 until 1970.


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