Why people still buy globes, and how making them can be a ‘political minefield’ of disputed borders and sensitive countries

London globemaker Peter Bellerby thinks the human yearning to “find our place in the cosmos” has helped globes survive their original purpose – navigation – and the internet.

He says it is part of the reason he went into debt making a globe for his father’s 80th birthday in 2008. The experience helped inspire his company, which 16 years later employs a team of about two dozen artists, cartographers and woodworkers.

“You don’t go onto Google Earth to get inspired,” Bellerby says in his airy studio, surrounded by dozens of globes in various languages and states of completion. “A globe is very much something that connects you to the planet that we live on.”

Beyond the existential and historical appeal, earthly matters such as cost and geopolitics hover over globemaking. Bellerby says his company has experience with customs officials in regions with disputed borders such as India, China, North Africa and the Middle East.

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There is a real question about whether globes – especially handmade ones – remain relevant as more than works of art and history for those who can afford them. They are, after all, snapshots of the past – of the way their patrons and makers saw the world at a certain point in time. So they are inherently inaccurate representations of a planet in constant flux.

“Do globes play a relevant role in our time?” asks Jan Mokre, vice-president of the International Coronelli Society for the Study of Globes in Vienna, Austria. “If so, then in my opinion, this is due to their appearance as a three-dimensional body, the hard-to-control desire to turn them, and the attractiveness of their map image.

“Perhaps a certain nostalgia effect also plays a role, just as old cars and mechanical watches still exert a certain attraction on people.”

Joshua Nall, director of the Whipple Museum of the History of Science in Cambridge, England, says a globe remains a display of “the learning, the erudition, the political interests of its owner”.

Nall adds, though, that sadly he thinks globe usage is probably declining, particularly in schools, where digital technologies are taking over.

“I think now they’re perhaps more becoming items of overt prestige. They’re being bought as display pieces to look beautiful, which of course they always have been.”

Bellerby’s globes are not cheap. They run from around £1,300 (US$1,650) for the smallest to nearly £66,000 for the 50-inch (127cm) Churchill model. He makes about 600 globes a year of varying size, framing and ornamentation.

Creating them is a complex process that starts with the construction of a sphere and progresses to the application of fragile, petal-shaped panels, called “gores”, that are fitted together around the sphere’s surface.

Artists perched around Bellerby’s London studio painstakingly blend and apply paint: dreamy cobalt and mint for the oceans, yellow, greens and ochre for the landscape.

The imagery painted on the globes runs the gamut, from constellations to mountains and sea creatures.

Bellerby does not name clients, but he says they come from more socioeconomic levels than you would think: from families to businesses and heads of state. Private art collectors come calling. So do moviemakers.

Bellerby says in his book that the company made four globes for the 2011 movie Hugo. One globe can be seen in the 2023 movie Tetris, a free-standing, straight-leg Galileo model, which features prominently in a scene.

And yes, some of the planet’s wealthiest people buy them. The family of German tool and hardware company chairman Reinhold Würth gave him a Churchill, the largest model, for his 83rd birthday. It is now on display at the Museum Würth 2 in Berlin.

His granddaughter, Maria Wurth, says in an Instagram video that the piece highlights the history of the company and the magnate’s travels.

There is no international standard for a correctly drawn earth. Countries, like people, view the world differently, and some are highly sensitive about how their territory is depicted. To offend them with “incorrectly” drawn borders on a globe is to risk impoundment of the orbs at customs.

“Globemaking is a political minefield,” Bellerby writes.

China does not recognise Taiwan as a country. Morocco does not recognise Western Sahara. India’s northern border is disputed. Many Arab countries, such as Lebanon, do not acknowledge Israel.

Bellerby says the company marks disputed borders as disputed: “We cannot change or rewrite history.”

No one knows when the first terrestrial globe was created. But the oldest known surviving one dates to 1492. No one in Europe knew of the existence of North or South America at the time.

That globe is called the “Erdapfel”, which translates to “earth apple” or “potato”. It was made by German navigator and geographer Martin Behaim, who was working for the king of Portugal, according to the Whipple Museum. It contains more than just the cartographical information then known, also detailing commodities overseas, market places and local trading protocols.

It is also a record of a troubled time.

“The Behaim Globe now serves as a vital document of European global conquest and the Atlantic slave trade,” according to the German National Museum’s web page on the globe, which is exhibited there.

“The globe makes clear how much the emergence of our modern world was based on the violent appropriation of raw materials, on the slave trade and the plantation economy,” it adds, with the globe showing “the first stage of European subjugation and division of the world”.

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If you have got a globe of any sort, you are in good company. During World War II, two in particular were commissioned for leaders on opposite sides of the Atlantic as symbols of power and partnership.

For Christmas in 1942, the United States delivered gigantic twin globes to American president Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. They were 50 inches in diameter and hundreds of pounds each, believed to be the largest and most accurate globes of the time.

It took more than 50 government geographers, cartographers and draftsmen to compile the information to make the globes, constructed by globemakers Weber Costello of Chicago Heights, in the US state of Illinois.

The Roosevelt globe now sits in the Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, New York, and Churchill’s globe is at Chartwell House, the Churchill family home, in Kent, England, according to the US Library of Congress.

In theory, the leaders could use the globes simultaneously to formulate war strategy.

“In reality, however,” Bellerby writes, “the gift of the globes was a simple PR exercise, an important weapon in modern warfare.”