An interesting structure that we will never see. And it could become, another tourist Mecca, on a global scale. One of the pearls of the capital of the British Empire. But the circumstances are such that we can learn about Wilde's Big Globe only from engravings and interesting stories of that time that have survived to this day. But they also wanted to dismantle the Eiffel Tower after the 1989 World Exhibition.
A renowned British cartographer and former Member of Parliament, James Wyld had a brilliant plan to promote his card business. Cartographic, to be precise. In my opinion, he had nothing to do with gambling.
The Great Exhibition, or World's Fair, was held in 1851, at Hyde Park, London. Has been visited by prominent industrial figures, scientists and artists from all over the world. And also, members of royal families from all over the world, including representatives of the British crown.
Wilde, learning about the future, thought it was a good chance to become famous and become famous. To do this, you need to do something really interesting and memorable. Or maybe create a huge model of the earth with an accurate depiction of the landscapes of our planet? It was a brilliant, new and fresh idea at the same time, which had never been realized before. A giant or Great Globe made for an exhibition is something that will help to become famous, to conclude new deals and increase sales, a family business.
Wild came up with his idea to the members of the organizing committee of the Great Exhibition, but was disappointed that the pavilion erected for the World's Fair - the Crystal Palace, was too small to accommodate a 60-foot globe.
In addition, the organizers were not overly fond of Wilde, for his desire to use the exhibition as a vehicle to promote personal business. His offer was rejected. Undaunted, Wild began to look for an alternative solution. Leicester Square has become a suitable location for the project, the Great Globe. After difficult negotiations with the owners of the land, it was allowed to build a Globe there and keep it for 10 years. With the right to prolong or demolish all structures and return the original look to the local beauty.
Promotional video:
Construction of the Wild's Globe began immediately after signing an agreement with the landlords. Under the supervision of Edward Welch, the project's architect, about 300 builders worked tirelessly to build the miracle project, night and day.
Wild's Great Globe was not an ordinary globe in our understanding. It was a globe with a terrestrial relief on the inner walls of the structure, not outside. An interesting idea for our time.
A series of platforms, connected by stairs inside, allowed visitors to admire every square inch of the giant map. The relief of mountains and rivers was made three-dimensional to make them more visible. The fertile land was green and the deserts were sandy yellow. Volcanoes were made to erupt using dyed lava wool. Smoke from the volcanoes reached the snowy mountains, strewn with white crystals that sparkled brightly in the light of the gas lamps.
It was the most reliable map of our planet at the time. Except for the fact that Antarctica was missing. At the time, the great, southern continent was largely unknown, and although sightings of the vast ice shelf and land have been recorded over the past thirty years, Wild did not believe these stories.
The Globe became a hit, proving its popularity as well as the World's Fair. Many visitors who came to the Great Exhibition also went to see Wilde's Great Globe.
After the exhibition ended, the number of visitors to the Globe dropped sharply, but by 1853 it was still attracting 1.2 million visitors a year. By the late 1850s, the building began to look shabby. Expensive repairs were required. Wild was forced to use the venue for various shows in order to attract visitors and make money. But every year, the Big Globe looked worse, and the money from visits was not enough to maintain a decent look.
Wilde's agreement to use the land expired in 1862, after which the showroom was removed and the globe was broken up and sold for scrap.
Before the "Great Globe" there were similar projects on a smaller scale. In 1664, a small hollow ball was built for the Danish Duke Frederick III. And in 1820 a similar balloon was built in Paris. But Wilde's Globe was the first and probably the last of its kind. At least larger and more durable than the paper construction of its predecessors in Paris.
It wasn't until 1930 that construction began on a globe-like Wild in Boston, USA. In 1935, the Christian Scientific Publishing Society built a 30-foot-high glass globe called the Mapparium. The map of the world was projected inside, just like in Wild's globe, and could be seen on the inner bridge running through the entire globe.
Wyld's Great Globe, also known as the Wylds Great Globe or Wyld's Monster Globe. It is considered a London landmark, located in Leicester Square from 1851 to 1862. Built by James Wyld (James Wyld years of life 1812-1887). He was not much, not a little, the court cartographer of Queen Victoria.
It was originally planned to display the structure at the World's Fair in London's Hyde Park in 1851, but the globe was placed in Leicester Square. There are two main versions of why this happened: the organizers supposedly believed that James Wyld was going to advertise his business for the production of geographic maps in this way. According to another version, the globe was simply huge and did not fit in the Crystal Palace of Hyde Park.
The structure was a hollow sphere, more than 18 meters in diameter. Inside, the surface of the earth was modeled, there was a four-story platform, to which one could climb the stairs and view the continents. Visitors entered the attraction through a door located in the Pacific Ocean.
A bit of background and a slightly different approach to the history of the project
1851 year. Britain rules over the seas and a good quarter of the land. However, cheap black and white prints, with exotic views of the remote corners of the Empire for the British eye, did not in any way reflect the scale of the conquests.
To eliminate geographical illiteracy, other means were needed - maps, globes, textbooks on geography and cartography. A whole generation of explorers, missionaries and military men conquered new imperial possessions. They returned home with rich trophies. Among which there were strange trinkets and fantastic objects. There was something really interesting. And strange as it is, neatly compiled maps of overseas lands and seas.
By the middle of the century, they were drawn up in the atlases of the world of the British Empire, which, in contrast to the abstract list of topographic conquests of the Crown for most people, clearly illustrated its power and glory.
The need to know what you own, for the educated citizens of Great Britain, was an extension of their sense of religious responsibility for educating the "dark" natives of the empire's new provinces.
For James Wilde Jr., geography was at the heart of civilization, and trade was its engine: without knowing the former, the latter cannot be successful. However, the court geographer was not devoid of a practical vein, and therefore rather quickly figured out how to extract a very specific benefit from his postulate. "What is entertainment for one, business for another, while a child collects pieces of the past, and a politician looks into the future, a business man comes up with what profit he can derive from the present."
From his father, James Wilde inherited a successful business of selling maps and making globes. By the middle of the century, it had literally flooded the British market with affordable topographic products. So the map of Australia cost 6 shillings, and Africa - five. Wilde's educational maps, depicting Britain and the earth's continents in the light of recent geographical discoveries, also cost 6 shillings. He also published the Missionary Atlas, which provided a visual representation of the state of affairs on the fronts of Christian morality.
However, this was not enough for the vain geographer, Her Majesty. In 1851, his ambitions happily coincided with the imperial claims that took the form of the World's Fair. To demonstrate British grandeur, a very impressive Crystal Palace was built in Hyde Park. But even he turned out to be too small for the ambitious project of a keen cartographer.
In accordance with the global scale of the upcoming exhibition and in direct proportion to his ambitions, Wilde built a truly imperial globe, and to heighten the effect he turned it inside out. Inside, a ball illuminated by gas lanterns with a diameter of 18 and a half meters, a staircase rose with observation platforms at different levels, from which inquisitive visitors could admire detailed casts from the face of the Earth.
Yes, yes, these were not the usual paper maps glued to the concave walls of the superglobe, but volumetric gypsum mountains, rivers, seas and oceans. The work was done to match the size of the attraction - gigantic. First, a drawing was carefully created for each piece of the earth's surface measuring 5 degrees latitude and 3 degrees longitude.
After it passed a special test and was found to be reliable, it was placed on a cylindrical mold and covered with a layer of clay, onto which the designer had already transferred the lines drawn earlier by the artist. After that, the original drawing was removed, and on the created clay base mountains were "lined up", river beds were laid, lake depressions and other natural landscapes were molded. Numerous checks, corrections and improvements, the model became the mold according to which pieces of earth mosaic were cast in plaster - only about 6000 pieces with a total weight of 20 tons.
However, the original idea was much larger. Wild dreamed of building a globe with a diameter of 30 meters, directly in the Crystal Palace, so that all participating nations could admire their place on the world map. By the way, there was an idea to place all the participants of the Exhibition inside a giant model, taking into account where they came from, so that they really feel at home.
It was planned to place mountains, rivers and other roughness on the outer surface, and to arrange observation galleries around. Here, however, quite predictably, difficulties of an insurmountable nature arose, and the gigantic globe, having lost a fair share of its original solidity, found itself in Leicester Square. The idea itself has changed dramatically: it was decided to turn it inside out - after all, it is much more convenient to look at large cards when they are hanging on the wall than lying under your feet.
God created the universe in 6 days. It took James Wilde Jr. 3 months to create his model of the world. And although its version on a double scale - 10 geographical miles by 1 inch horizontally and 1 mile 1 inch vertically - was inferior in many ways to the original, it had one exceptional property - it was a perfect world. As they wrote then: "There is no dust here … no beggars, as in Ireland, no revolutions, as in France, no monks or mosquitoes, as in Italy, and no defeats, as in America."
Having paid a shilling, the curious got into the womb of the Earth through the entrance to the South Pacific Ocean: Antarctica was not known about it, and Wilde himself, considered the idea of the existence of a southern polar continent absurd. However, a holy place is never empty: instead of ice massifs, ladder supports were erected here.
At the North Pole, the African heat reigned: the heat emitted by gas lamps, according to all the laws of physics, was collected where in reality "there is always frost." At each level, gentlemen could be found with long pointers marking strategically important points on the map.
Honestly, Wilde's Big Globe had a lot of shortcomings: both geographical inaccuracies, and even just gross errors. And even a different aspect ratio. Two different scales for horizontal and vertical lines, which created a distorted image of the planet; plus flaws of a purely practical nature, such as a heap of massive wooden staircases and observation platforms, which greatly impeded the view.
But despite all this, as well as the clearly advertising nature of the building, the value of Wilde's project can hardly be overestimated: never before has geography been so clear and so fascinating for a common man in the street. The huge expenses at that time - over 20 thousand pounds - paid off in the first year. In 1853, 1.2 million people visited the Globe, however, its popularity was short-lived.
He stood in Leicester Square for ten years, for such a period Wilde rented a plot of land with the right to renew if the enterprise was successful; otherwise, he undertook to demolish the building, and "restore" a very unpresentable area, which meant turning it into a green oasis for the rest of pious townspeople. The businessman kept his promise exactly half, restoring the former, with heaps of garbage, flocks of wild cats and other dubious personalities.
Skeptics saw the Big Globe as nothing more than a branch of Wilde's store on the Strand. However, in this case, this is hardly a reproach. Well, something, but the power of England in the middle of the 19th century was based in many respects precisely on successful trade around the world. As Henry Morley said: "Take the ships and shops away from England, and what is left?"
Let me remind you that in the 19th century England even decided to attack Russia by participating in the Crimean War. Also, do not forget about the Opium Wars and other, criminal ways to enrich the empire. But the globe was torn down for nothing. It would be a popular place these days, like Big Ben. It is strange why the restoration of the project has not yet been organized.
At least in another place. It was really very interesting.