| Object ID |
1968.57 |
| Object Name |
Globe |
| Early Date |
1810 |
| Late Date |
1810 |
| Made By |
James A. Wilson |
| Description |
James Wilson of Bradford, Vt., a successful farmer and blacksmith, but a man of little formal education, became fascinated by geography and exploration. At 37 years of age, with a farm to run and children to support, he set forth to make globes as fine as those imported form England, and at a price village schools could afford. Wilson knew nothing of geography and cartography, or of astronomy and mathematics, but was determined to learn. In order to acquire the knowledge necessary to produce an accurate globe, Wilson purchased the 1797 eighteen-volume set of Encyclopaedia Britannica for the sum of $130, and also tried his hand at the difficult art of engraving. Unable to master this technique, Wilson traveled 250 miles on foot to New Haven, Ct. where he studied with the well-known engraver/cartographer, Amos Doolittle, engraver of the first maps to be published in the earliest known geography book in America.
By January of 1810, Wilson had sold "A New Terrestrial Globe, on Which the Facts & new Discoveries Are Laid Down from the Accurate Observations Made by Capts. Cook, Furneux, Phips, etc." Wilson made globes for more than 50 years and experimented with different models of the sun and earth and, in this sense, took part in the great explorations of the time. Although Wilson was married three times, fathered ten children, and worked on the family farm, he was self-educated. Today Wilson is renowned not only for making the first globe in the United States but also, with the help of his sons, for producing globes which changed the way Americans and others viewed the world.
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| Credit |
Gift of the Hall Park McCullough Fund. |
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