Wyld's Globe
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Wyld's Globe was situated in Leicester Square, London in England between 1851 and 1862.
It was constructed by James Wyld (1812–1887), a distinguished geographer and Member of Parliament.
The Globe was built at the time of the Great Exhibition. Inside a purpose-built building was a giant globe, 60 feet in diameter. The globe was hollow and contained a staircase and elevated platforms which members of the public could climb in order to view the continents and seas, complete with modeled mountain ridges and rivers all to scale.
Punch described the experience as "a geographical globule which the mind can take in at one swallow." After the 10-year lease had expired, it was removed in 1862, and the central garden of Leicester Square was redesigned.
[edit] Visitor experiences
A quote from a visitor to the Globe:
| “ | The representation of the earth's surface on the inside of a sphere has been tried on a considerable scale by Wyld's Globe in Leicester Square, and was found to be extremely interesting and instructive. Before seeing it I was prejudiced against it as being quite opposed to nature; but all my objections vanished when I entered the building and beheld the beautiful map-panorama from the central gallery. I visited it several times, and I never met with any one who was not delighted with it, or who did not find it most instructive in correcting the erroneous views produced by the usual maps and atlases. It remained for twelve years one of the most interesting exhibitions in London, when it was removed owing to the lease of the ground having expired. This globe was sixty feet in diameter, and it showed how grand would be the effect of one many times larger and admitting of greater detail, and of more striking effects by the view at different distances and under various kinds of illumination. | ” |
|
—Alfred Russel Wallace (1896) |
||
