The history of the globe is an interesting one. Ancient Greeks had known of the fact that the Earth was round, and had even discovered how to measure the circumference of the earth using angles and mathematics. Around this time they started making spherical objects made to represent what they knew of the Earth. When the Greeks were conquered their knowledge lived on for a while, but was eventually lost. Some parts of the philosophy would be picked back up again by the Muslims. As they read more about what the Greeks thought, they would occasionally try to re-create their science, usually succeeding. One of the things they tried to re-create was the globe and the mathematics determining the size of the Earth.
This recurrence of ideas would not hit Europe for quite a while longer. While reading Greek philosophy, parts about the shape of the Earth were often taken to mean that the Earth was a flat circle, like a map of the world, but not that the Earth was a round, spherical shape. Copernicus fought long and hard to try to convince the Theocracy of the time that his ideas were right, but he never invented an object we would describe as being a globe. It wasn’t until 1492, the same year Columbus set sail that a modern globe was created in western Europe by a man named Martin Behaim who lived in Germany.
When globes became mass marketed it was easiest to glue world maps onto spherical objects and this was generally the way that globes were made. A small disk is glued to the top and bottom to replace the irregularities that form at the poles. At this point in history it became customary to mount the globe at a 23.5 degrees angle so as to better represent the angle of the planet in relation to the sun, and to make it easier to visualize days and seasons.
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