SAN FRANCISCO, Ca., September 18 — So you wanna be like Columbus? Here’s a quiz: Point to Columbus, Ohio. No? How about Columbia, South Carolina? Any clue on Columbus, Georgia? The country of Colombia, even? Goodness gracious... you’d better give up on this whole geography idea, right? Wrong.
Mercantila Does Globes!
How did apples, eggs, and Eratosthenes put the world in the palm of your hand? In the Beginning. Dead noon. Summer solstice. Alexandria, Egypt. 250 BC. A pole casts a shadow, and Eratosthenes, a Greek mathematician so skilled he could apparently be in two places at once, thought it strange that a pole in Syrene, a town due south of Alexandria, cast no shadow at the same time. A blur of angles and equations later, he came within 76 miles of calculating the earth’s diameter.
By the time another century passed, many Greeks had figured out the earth was round, but they had no clue about a) where it fit in the universe or b) most other would-be countries on this particular sphere of theirs. That didn’t stop Greek cartographer Crates of Mallus, armed with absolutely no awareness of China, Australia, or the Americas, from making the world’s first globe in 140 BC. Half a planet away, in China, two schools of thought held: the earth was a hemisphere-like globe sliced in half underneath a dome-shaped universe, or the universe was shaped like an egg, with a sphere-shaped earth in the middle and playing the yolk. Innovations About 1,100 years later, things started refining. A former Arabian slave named al-Khazini came up with a theory of gravity in the 1300s; a hundred or so years later, those intrepid Europeans started sailing around and discovering things, and the globe started filling in, all full-picture-like. Some intelligent fellows named Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton (there’s that apple, then) did their bit to show the earth in relation to the universe, and after a few more centuries of cartographical heavy lifting, globe-making became more about spit, polish, political realignments, and painstaking craftsmanship. As for America’s first commercial globe-maker, that’d be James Wilson. The New Hampshire-born, Vermont-raised farmer and blacksmith ogled a couple of globes at nearby Dartmouth College, decided to mass-produce his own, and established his "artificial globe manufactory" in 1818 in Albany, N.Y. What’s In It For You? Aesthetics. What a wonderful world, indeed. Especially when you throw in craftsmanship, artistry, pretty colors, flashing lights, exquisite stands, and... uh, okay. What was I looking for? Oh, right. Siberia. Accuracy. Check your average wall map — a fine teaching tool in its own right — and you’ll notice that Greenland looks like South America’s not-so-little brother. That’s called distortion, kids, and it’s much less of a problem when the world is represented in its true round shape. Plus, the newer the globe, the less you have to worry about explaining antiquities like Persia. Or East Germany. Academia. What’s more fun for a kid than standing on top of the world — or at least giving it a good spin? Point to your hometown; point to your grandma’s birthplace; point to the nation of origin of that pair of Nikes. It’s never too early to know your place, after all. Go ahead; find an elementary-school homeroom that argues otherwise. Assortment. Globes for your desk! Globes for your parlor! Globes for your massive observatory! Globes to dress up your Renaissance festival! Globes for your wall (call ’em " wall maps" if you must)! Globes for the Star Trek convention! Or just your average ol’ Joe Globe. Meet your match: Elementary teacher? Museum curator? Mansion owner? General geography fan? We’ve got globes for all of you worldly types. | | Save & Share |  5% off the world!!
Take 5% off any world globe. Enter coupon code WRLDG at check out. Coupon valid through 9/30/2006 at | | |
| Penny For Your Thoughts? |  We sell a lot of stuff. Is there any particular line of products that's always mystified / fascinated you? (Go on, admit it. We're retail freaks. We're into this.)
Tell us why you're so curious -- give us a good enough story, and we'll give you the inside scoop. (Nobody wants pennies these days anyway.) Send your reply to readers@mercantila.com | | |
