How globes were made in 1955

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Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/03/07/how-globes-were-made-in-1955.html

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I wonder if modern globe-making is really automated or still nearly as manual as shown – just in places like China rather than England.

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I’m guessing more globes are injection molded plastic these days. What used to take 15 hours probably takes closer to 15 seconds these days.

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Déjà vu:

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source

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Wait, they’re not just shrunken-down planets from alternate dimensions?

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Here’s the modern version. Rather than paper strips carefully laid out on a perfect plaster sphere, they make it out of two cardboard hemispheres. A heated mold will press a petal-shaped cutout in to a hemisphere, set the glue, and emboss mountains.

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“Whilst the rest of the world tries to blow itself up”. Ha! As true today as it was then!

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I feel a little cheated just watching people glue a map to a ball.

I wanted to see how they did a relief map.

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You can still get globes like this made in England. They’re just really, really expensive:

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I’d guess vacuum forming would be more viable - mold so large would cost fortune. On the other hand with mass production it could be profitable anyway.

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I think they don’t mention that they cut the paper mache hemispheres off the wooden mold.
See ~ 48 seconds.

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Can’t resist… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6l6vqPUM_FE

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The thing that struck me as perhaps the most different from modern factory work is that none of those folks wore gloves before mucking with goo, plaster, or adhesives. How did their hands ever survive?

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I was wondering about that - I assumed that’s what they did, and then they completely avoided talking about that step (and whatever they did to reassemble the halves), but it would be obviously absurd to have this heavy, solid wooden core and then put papier-mâché and plaster on top. (Not only would it be heavy as hell, but the papier-mâché and plaster would both be redundant.) This also explains the use of plaster, which confused me - the two papier-mâché halves probably don’t fit together too smoothly after being cut off the mold and reassembled, so plaster helps make it more perfectly round.

Yeah, I’m assuming they used traditional materials there (basically wheat-based adhesives), so though non-toxic, they would still be hard on the hands. A friend, when in her 20s, was an assistant to a ceramics-based artist, so she was always preparing wet clay and similar materials. She said it gave her pretty bad eczema, with her hands constantly dry, cracked and bleeding. It visibly aged her hands a few decades. True for a lot of work that involves working with non-toxic wet materials.

Exactly the kind I had as a kid. I was thinking the cardboard version replaced this more laborious papier-mâché and plaster type, but I looking for dates on cardboard globes, they seemingly were in use for decades before this film was made. May have been an issue of different qualities…

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They mention some globes going for 1000 pounds in 1955, which would be at least $33,000 today

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Imgur

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If you can afford a secret lair in a volcano you can afford the BIG globe.

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Here’s a video showing how it was done back in 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JSfj99ly2c

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Numbers for a relief map, to scale: Mt everest, 9 km; earth diameter 13000 km. A globe 13 meters in diameter would have Mt. Everest at 9 mm tall. Earth as a billiard ball would be tournament grade.

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