Watch Artisans Craft Old-Fashioned Globes By Hand

Kirstin Fawcett
mental_floss

Long before Google maps existed, we used globes to get a sense of the world’s scale. In the footage above—filmed in 1955 and archived by British Pathé, the UK newsreel archive company—you can watch artisans in a North London workshop assemble the tiny Earth replicas by hand. Layer by layer, they methodically cover a solid ball of wood in paper and plastic. Then, they paste a map across its outer surface and coat it in layers of varnish. The process is painstaking, which makes it all the more incredible that the workshop once produced more than 60,000 globes each year.