By Joseph Citro, author of Weird New England
Eartha is the name given to the largest globe in the world, and that’s according to the Guinness Book of World Records. It is conspicuously situated at the DeLorme Map Store in Yarmouth, Maine, where its creator, David DeLorme, took a good deal longer than seven days to bring it about. Diameter: 43 feet. Circumference: 130.91 feet. Surface area: 2,727.52 square feet. Weight: 6,000 pounds. Scale: 1:1,000,000; one one-millionth of the earth’s actual size. The thing seems almost big enough to support life.
Eartha rotates every 17 minutes, driven by two computer-controlled electric motors. Nearly 140 gigabytes of data—that’s about 214 CD-ROMs—went into designing its surface. If you stand and watch it rotate, you’ll be seeing the equivalent of 100 CD-ROMs of data pass by every minute. To put that into some sort of useful perspective, the average person reads about one CD-ROM's worth of text in an entire lifetime.
Eartha is tilted 23.5 degrees, just like Earth, with one inch equaling nearly 16 miles. Maine is as big as a welcome mat. The state of California is three and a half feet tall!
One thing’s for sure: that’s one mother of an earth.
Until Eartha (in Yarmouth, Maine) came into being, the largest globe in the world was in Apecchi, Italy, measuring 33 feet in diameter. Here in the USA, our grandest globe was the 28-footer at Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts. The Babson ball is still there and is well worth a look.
While Eartha is indoors, Babson’s Ball is entirely outside, making it the biggest outdoor planet on the planet. The idea was to represent earth as it would be perceived from 5,000 miles out in space, so in a sense, anyone can be an astronaut without leaving earth.
Roger Webber, grandson of the college's founder, came up with the idea in 1947. In this cosmology, one day equals one year, so it took 7 years to create this mini-earth from 578 enameled panels. At a weight of 25 tons, it was nonetheless designed so it could rotate on its axis. But, dark days were ahead. Within 30 years it began to fall apart, showing all the symptoms of a dying planet. Yet, our story has a happy ending. The globe was rescued and restored. Today it’s a new and better world, which may mean there is some hope for its prototype.
At a mere 30 feet in diameter, this one is sort of a loser in terms of size, but Boston’s Mapparium demonstrates a totally unique approach to globe-building. Located at the Christian Science Center at 175 Huntington Avenue, the Mapparium is a giant, hollow, brilliantly colored, stained-glass sphere. A walkway known as the “Crystal Bridge” runs through its center. This “tunnel” allows you to step into the earth by sinking into the Indian Ocean, walking through, and emerging in the South Pacific.
But, it would be a mistake to travel too quickly. If you hang out inside, you can study the colorfully backlit countries of the world as they were configured when the globe was made in 1932. Not only does the Mapparium offer a treat for the eyes, there’s a mystery for the ears as well. The glass inner surface reflects sound so precisely that a whisper uttered at one end of the bridge can be clearly heard at the other. It’s like a ghost whispering into your ear.
In 1935 electricians illuminated the Mapparium with 300 60-watt light bulbs. Today, it has been fitted with 206 LED light fixtures that can be programmed to produce up to 16 million dazzling colors.
To save you some counting time, the glass globe is made up of 608 pieces of contoured glass held within a bronze frame. Each panel covers 10 degrees of latitude and longitude. A circle of clocks lets you know what time it is anywhere in the world.
This unusual work of art was designed by Chester Lindsay Churchill, the architect who designed the building that houses it. We can honestly say there is nothing like it on, in, or under the world. The Mapparium has our vote for winner of the “War of the Worlds” competition—it is not to be missed.
|
|
