1765131370Code 8333 Terrestrial GlobePolitical tabletop globe with a stylized Art Deco airplane-shaped base, produced in 1930 by Weber Costello Co., Chicago Heights, Illinois.
This lithographed papier-mâché globe features a territorial map, ocean currents, and major trade routes of the period. As indicated in the legend, it includes capitals and cities, railroads, steamship lines, canals, and mountain peaks. Both the airplane-shaped base and the meridian semicircle are made of zamak.
The globe also features a large figure-eight analemma, positioned in the Pacific, showing solar declination and the equation of time throughout the year: a characteristic feature of pre-war educational globes, when astronomy applied to navigation still played a key role in schools.
Good condition, with some stains and signs of wear. Dimensions: sphere diameter 30 cm – 12 in, height 40 cm – 15.8 in
C. F. Weber & Co. purchased the globe business of A. H. Andrews & Co. in 1896. The company became Weber Costello Frick Co. in 1902 and Weber Costello in 1909.
By the 1920s, the company boasted that it had some of the largest and best-equipped facilities in the world, boasting 40 years of experience in globe production.
During the interwar years, Weber Costello became a leading supplier of school globes in the United States, working with both cartographers and publishers throughout Europe.
Famous success came during World War II when the company produced a pair of 50-inch (127 cm) globes, sending one to Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the other to Churchill in London so they could coordinate their strategic plans while looking at the same globe.
Production of Weber Costello globes continued until about the 1960s, after which time the company ceased its globe business.
Humans have always desired to understand the world in which they live and have used all means
at their disposal to measure the space around them, continually expanding their knowledge. The conditions that allowed humans to develop models of the world and space likely arose only after thought had developed to the point of understanding that natural processes could be represented through models. Already in ancient Greece, naturalists had come to understand the sphericity of the Earth and its suspended position in space. The first recorded 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.
It was with the nineteenth century, marked by widespread trade, circulation, and the introduction of compulsory education, that the desire to explore distant lands increased, 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.
