Please take part in our Reader Survey!
The Whole World in His Hands
by Jamey Landry
On Christmas Eve, 1968, men took the first image of the earth from the proximity of another celestial body. That photograph, NASA image # AS08-14-2383, also known as Earthrise, was taken by the Apollo 8 crew during the first manned orbit of the moon. It contrasts the barren moonscape and the vast black emptiness of space against the lush, cloud-covered blue-green orb of the earth. It is perhaps the single most important image of the 20th century, but not only for the obvious technological achievement it represents—reaching the moon. From space, the photo shows the earth is indeed like a big blue marble, beautiful and, at the same time, fragile.
“That’s exactly why I started making globes,” says Bill Kiermaier, owner and chief cartographer of GeoSpherical Graphics, whose globes can be found in classrooms, corporate offices, government buildings and libraries. Kiermaier, a resident of Mandeville, says his “whole point of globe making is to disseminate information about the fragility of our planet” and to create understanding that the global culture is in constant political, economic and environmental flux. As technology seemingly shrinks the world and leaves its imprint on the environment, Kiermaier maintains that globes afford a more acute understanding of these relationships than a flat map could.
“Globes are very important tools now that we realize what a small world we live in. Especially with the double-edged [sword] of globalization, we need to be aware that we’re all the same, that we all live on one little planet. We’re all in the same boat, so to speak, and we all need to take better care of it,” Kiermaier says.
A furniture and architectural details manufacturer, Kiermaier has been building globes for more than eighteen years. Originally, he built 18-inch desktop models, which he sold to school benefactors who then donated them to local schools. Keirmaier’s globes have since found their way into corporate offices and government buildings, including a 76-inch model at the new Covington courthouse, and a 54-inch custom model for the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
Kiermaier’s globes are custom built of wood or fiberglass, depending on the desired size. They are available in five diameters: The smallest is 18 inches, and they graduate up to 36 inches for a medium-size globe. The largest, a 76-inch diameter behemoth, measures a full 241 inches in circumference and features a stainless-steel stand that can be customized with computer-controlled gimbals to rotate the globe to simulate the earth’s rotation. Some globes even incorporate fiber-optic lighting details.
Each wooden globe is assembled from 192 pieces of hand-cut maple to form the basic sphere. After much fitting, shaping and sanding by hand over a period of about a month, the completed sphere is ready for paint and detailing. For globes over 36 inches in diameter, Kiermaier hand lays fiberglass into enormous moulds to form two hemispheres, then carefully bonds the hemispheres together to form the globe.
Mapping and detailing the globes are even more time consuming than the construction of the sphere, but equally satisfying, according to Kiermaier. Because his globes are all made to order, he is able to produce representations of any period in time, provided maps exist. The mapping on Kiermaier’s globes can be either political maps, which show borders, cities and other landmarks, or physical maps that show typography and other geological features. Usually, customers opt for a combination of both political and physical mapping.
Although flat maps are used as the basis for detailing globes, the process is not as simple as cutting a map into strips and then pasting them to the sphere. This is because of the inherent distortion of flat maps, which is caused by the impossibility of squashing a spherical planet into a completely flat surface. Throughout the 20th century, mathematicians and cartographers, including Buckminster Fuller, produced flat maps with minimal distortion, but they have been met with little acceptance.
The most common maps are the Mercator-style maps, developed in the 16th century by the Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator to aid marine navigation. These flat maps lay out the earth’s landmasses and other features in a single-plane view, superimposed with the latitude and longitudinal lines forming perfect squares on the map surface. Although these maps are more practical for use in navigation than is a globe, they unfortunately misrepresent the relative sizes and positions of the landmasses. Landmasses near the tops and bottoms of the map sheet are more distorted in their relative sizes than those near the equator. More alarmingly, portions of the North and South Poles are deleted entirely.
“There’s a tremendous amount of distortion on a Mercator map at the higher latitudes, and always has been. For example, South America is actually seven times larger than Greenland, but on a Mercator map it isn’t shown that way, so you have to take care of those kinds of distortions when you make a globe,” Kiermaier says
To correct the anomalies, Kiermaier creates a corrected projection of the map using spherical trigonometry. Once the new map projection is completed, it is then traced onto frisket paper and carefully cut out using a razor knife to create a gore, a template of the landmass. The gores are then transferred to the waiting globe. Details such as painting, landscape texturing and lettering are then applied. Smaller globes can take as few as two months to complete, while the largest 77-inch models may take Kiermaier and a team of workers six months or more to complete.
Although time consuming to create, Kiermaier says that marketing his globes has actually been more difficult than constructing them. “It was hard to find legitimacy for the larger globes, and the smaller ones just don’t pay off as well,” he says. Seeking to build brand awareness for his globes, he eventually made a contact in the map department of the Library of Congress. That person later introduced him to the director of the map division of the library. A period of correspondence, information sharing and negotiations began between the two. As luck would have it, the department head was to attend a conference in New Orleans, and so paid a visit to Kiermaier’s shop.
“By that time, they were interested in buying a globe, but the director wanted to come over and take a look at them,” Kiermaier recalls. “When he got to the shop, at first he was taken aback, because he expected to see a big operation in a super-clean, high-tech environment. Instead, what he saw was the way they used to make globes—an old-fashioned, old-school globe-making shop. Real globes made by hand. All those old-time zillion-dollar globes used to be made in shops like mine.” That visit prompted the Library of Congress in 2003 to commission Kiermaier to build a 54-inch globe for its reading room.
“It’s taken me three years, from inception to actually producing the globe, and that includes developing the spheres, developing the maps, the articulated stand and developing the system of annotating [labeling] and accurately detailing the topography of the globe,” Kiermaier says. He and many volunteers, including local jeweler René Chapotel, spent numerous hours detailing the globe. It was recently delivered and installed at the Library of Congress.
Kiermaier’s Web site (www.theworldglobe.com) gives a glimpse of the amount of work involved in creating his globes. It’s also a virtual almanac of space and geological facts with its news-style ticker crawling along the bottom of the page, in keeping with Kiermaier’s self-appointed mission to educate people about the earth.
“History has shown that past civilizations that were not aware of environmental issues have collapsed, in part due to that ignorance. How do you deal with that on a flat map when it really doesn’t show how everything is interconnected? Globes solve that. I have a business plan that would position globes not only to make money, but to also subtly promote awareness of environmental issues that are important for our survival—issues that I think most people are ignoring.”
