Wyld's Great Globe - The Great Globe

The Great Globe

The building, which was reminiscent of the Coliseum in Regents Park, was entered through the newly laid out gardens via one of four loggias facing north (the main entrance), south, east and west, which opened into a large vestibule paved with "patent lava" and from there through turnstiles into Jermyn's circular corridor. This corridor was hung with examples of Wyld's maps and there were examples of his guides and globes on display tables. The corridor was decorated with blue arabesques and lit by globe-shaped lamps with crimson tassels hung from ornate beams. The internal pillars were painted in a rich brown and decorated with copies of Moorish architectural designs from the Alhambra in Granada. The inner wall of this corridor was comprised in part by the rendered exterior surface of the Globe itself; the portion visible from within the corridor was painted blue with the positions of the stars in the night sky picked out in silver. The value of the star map as an educational tool was diminished as only a little of the convex face of the Globe was visible above the supporting wall and much of that was obscured by the numerous beams and supports criss-crossing the interior of the corridor.

The Architect criticised the internal decoration, much of which was by the theatrical scenery designer William Roxby Beverley, for being too restrained. Besides the circular corridor, Jermyn also designed a Moorish gate for the approach to the Globe's entrance. Four large galleries were later built between the loggias to surround the internal corridor and there was a refreshment stand to service the queues waiting to enter the globe. The building was about 180 feet (55 m) square and the external walls about 20 feet (6.1 m) high. The 68-foot-high (21 m) domed roof was originally specified in zinc, but Wyld insisted on it being made in lead, which had added to the cost and complexity of the build. Wyld complained that the building had not been finished to a high standard: there were cracks in the plaster and brickwork, leaks from rain, and there were complaints about the smell from the blocked drains almost as soon as the attraction opened to the public.

The external diameter of the globe itself was 60 feet 4 inches (18.39 m). The frame was formed by 32 large wooden trusses which were in turn supported by a brick enclosure rendered externally in cement. Between the trusses were smaller horizontal ribs from which zinc bands supported plaster casts of the features of the earth created from clay originals. There were about 6,000 of these plaster casts, each about 3 feet (0.91 m) square and 1 inch (2.5 cm) thick. These castings had proved particularly problematic – not only did they have to butt together perfectly but they also had to have a tiny curvature to fit to the concave interior of the shell – Wyld had needed three attempts to perfect the design. The production procedure was also time-consuming: the appropriate scale section of the Earth's surface would first be traced out on paper, then transferred to clay modelled with the appropriate topography, from which a mould would be taken; the mould was then tried and any corrections made before a final cast was produced and passed to the painters for decoration.

By day the globe was illuminated by the light from the glass set into the dome directly above it and by night with gas lighting. Visitors entered the globe through an opening into the Pacific Ocean, then ascended through a series of four platforms. At each stage they could see a different portion of the world represented on the concave interior face of the globe. The platform scaffolding was built up from the conveniently desolate Southern Ocean; Antarctica was largely unknown at the time – Wyld dismissed stories of the existence of a great Southern continent:

It was formerly imagined that a great continent must exist somewhere towards the South Pole, to counterbalance the mass of land lying in the northern hemisphere, but the discoveries of the English, under Ross, and of the American, French, and Russian navigators, prove, that although a large mass of broken land, with volcanoes now burning, exists there, the southern continent cannot be of a great extent."

The platforms were separated by about 10 feet (3.0 m) and those closer to the Globe's equator were wider so there was always a gap of about 3 feet (0.91 m) between the platform and the surface of the globe. Although the staircase and platforms allowed closer examination of individual sections, the structure prevented an appreciation of the globe as a single unit, and later there were plans for its removal. Some ventilation was provided by a system housed at the North Pole, which had the advantage of being quite featureless and located at the top of the globe, but the heat generated from the gas lighting and the mass of visitors meant the attraction was still uncomfortably hot; Henry Morley remarked that "the heat reflected on all sides from the concave surfaces rises to make a little Sahara of the North Pole Station", and Punch commented that the temperature was "equal to that of any baker's oven."

The representation of the Earth's surface was to a scale of 10 miles to the inch (about 6.4 kilometres to the centimetre) in the horizontal plane, but to allow the details of mountain ranges and great craters to be easily observed the altitude scale was ten times that of the surface plane (at one mile to the inch). As the British Quarterly Review remarked in an article on the problems of accurately representing the Earth's features, Wyld would have had to construct a globe with three times the diameter to unify the scales. The depiction of the earth concentrated on physical geography; there were no country names or borders shown. Fertile land was picked out in green and deserts shown in a sandy yellow. The minute detail was less than carefully observed; Wyld aimed for a broad stroke to capture the imagination rather than the accuracy of the Ordnance Survey. Active volcanoes were picked out with a fiery red with cotton wool smoke, and snowy mountains with white crystal that sparkled in the gas light. The Almanack of the Fine Arts for 1852 felt that the globe could "scarcely be deemed a work of art", but praised some of the fine tinting work.