1778086579Code 8485 Terrestrial GlobeTerrestrial globe published in the 1920s by the French geographer J. Forest; in addition to the territorial map, it depicts the ocean currents and the main trade routes of the period. Papier-mâché and plaster sphere covered with sections of copperplate engraving paper and watercolored on a turned and ebonized wooden base.
Good condition signs of use. Dimensions: 30 x 60 cm – 11.8 x 23.6 in.
J. Forest created a wide variety of globes in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, primarily for educational purposes. His diverse production included table globes, some on turned and ebonized wooden bases, floor globes, and innovative globes, such as those with mechanically rotating bases or globes that included lighters. In the 20th century, Forest produced illuminated globes with modern aluminum bases.
The Paris meridian was defined on June 21, 1667, by mathematicians of the Académie, but its measurement was not completed until 1718 by Giovanni Domenico Cassini and his son Jacques.
In 1740, César-François Cassini corrected the line, and between 1792 and 1798, Jean-Baptiste Joseph Delambre and Pierre Méchain remeasured it to precisely establish the length of the meter in 1799.
During the Washington International Conference of 1884, the Paris meridian was replaced by the Greenwich meridian, primarily because there were few inhabited lands at the antipodes of Greenwich, the British promise to adopt the metric system in exchange for France's renunciation, and the dominance of English nautical cartography, which would have necessitated updating numerous charts if a different meridian had been chosen.
In France, the Greenwich meridian was not officially adopted until 1911.
The first recorded terrestrial globe is the one attributed by Strabo, historian and geographer, to the Greek Crates of Mallo (c. 150 BC). The first globes, constructed in the early 16th century under the impetus of great geographical explorations, immediately began to be used for educational purposes in princely courts, monasteries, and colleges; the globe later began to conquer universities and high schools. In the 18th century, Didier Robert de Vaugondy, the official geographer of King Louis XV of France, thanks to his experience in globe construction, expanded the article “Globe” of the Encyclopédie by illustrating in detail the distinction between a celestial globe (which represents the concave surface of the sky with its constellations) and a terrestrial globe (which instead represents the surface of the Earth with its seas, islands, rivers, cities, etc.) and the techniques for making them: two papier-mâché hemispheres pressed and modeled on or inside a hemispherical mold, dried and strengthened on the inside with a wooden board, then glued and covered with a thin layer of plaster on which the globe’s meridians of areas between two meridians, generally twelve, were glued, made of paper previously printed by engraving on a copper plate and colored, each of which covered 30 degrees of longitude.
It was with the nineteenth century, with its widespread trade, circulation, and the introduction of compulsory education, that the desire to explore distant lands grew, making the old method of globe construction inadequate. Printed globes from engraved plates were no longer sufficient, and the only real resource became lithography, which made it possible to print and promptly update maps that, with the growth of geographical discoveries in various countries, became increasingly obsolete.
