From the archive
Click on the images to enlarge them.
Was Dozy’s globe of 1881–1882 more than seventy years ahead of its time?
The increased availability of digitized newspapers sometimes leads to an unexpected discovery. What to think of the following case which I came across in the 1954 volume of the newspaper Dagblad voor Amersfoort?
On November 4th, 1954, an article appears under the title “Klapglobe” (Collapsible Globe), in which a famous cartographer of the National Geographic Society shows a new gadget which he recently developed, a globe with an umbrella mechanism.
Exactly one week later, a 73-year old Rotterdammer replied to the article by showing off a globe with umbrella frame, which his father had obtained in 1882 from publishing house Elsevier, as a gift when subscribing to the Dutch version of Jules Verne’s Histoire des grands voyages et des grands voyageurs. He still keeps the globe in its original wooden box.
This globe is of course well-known to us. It was described and illustrated in our new Jules Verne bibliography.
