How Globes Are Made, 1955 Edition

Just what does it take to put together a globe? Many hours and a lot of plaster.

A British Pathé video from 1955, which was spotted by Open Culture, takes us inside a geographer’s office in London to see how handmade globes are created. You can see the workers fashioning worlds from solid blocks of wood, then coating them with nine different layers of plaster. According to the narrator, molding the globe into a smooth, plaster sphere—which looks a lot like playing a video game with a trackball—took six hours. After the mold was finished, strips of map were glued on in precisely the right alignment to create a seamless globe. The whole process took about 15 hours.

These days, you can still be a globe-making artisan, but you’ll need many years of apprenticeship to do so.

[h/t Open Culture]