"Wilson had his encyclopedia, but how was he to translate the information he found there onto his wooden spheres?"

Curiosities Encountered:
James Wilson and Provincial Cartography in the United States, 1790-1840
David Jaffee

II. Curiosity Unleashed

Globes captured James Wilson’s imagination. Few eighteenth-century American households could boast owning a globe. Those who did likely purchased their globes from London manufacturers. Instrument makers, engravers, and clock makers all produced globes in Britain. Many considered "cordwainer" William Bardin the leading late-eighteenth-century globe maker. Bardin and others relied on forms introduced with Martin Behaim’s hollow wooden Nuremburg globe of 1492. Behaim’s globe making principles were codified and transmitted in print in Diderot’s Encyclopedie, the source of information contained in Wilson’s own Encyclopedia Britannica. Globe makers who followed Behaim’s example used a solid wood mould with wire pivots at each end, which became the poles. The ball was covered with successive layers of damp papier-mâché or paper. When the paper dried, the shell was cut into two halves around the circumference of the equator, an axle shaft of wood was tacked at the poles, and the globe put back together and sealed. Thin layers of plaster were applied and guidelines drawn so that printed gores could be attached. The discovery of gores–the map of the world broken into twelve sections–solved the problem of how to fit flat paper maps over spheres. In the early sixteenth century, engravers and printers began to produce gores for eager globe makers. Globe making thus sat at the intersection of woodworking, metalworking, printing, and mapmaking, as Wilson would soon discover.

In the eighteenth century, globe making caught fire. Interest was fueled by the era’s expansion of geographical knowledge, thanks to traders and explorers, especially Captain James Cook. Cook’s Pacific voyages rounded out European knowledge of the world. The information he brought back gave Enlightenment globes their marked "oceanic character," as geographer Denis Cosgrove has reminded us. Cook’s voyages captured Americans’ imagination, too. There was a growing interest in popular science and geographic discoveries in elite and not so elite circles along with a desire to display that newfound knowledge in homes and schools. Wilson shared this interest, but how did he come to make globes?

Wilson was born in Londonderry, New Hampshire, in 1763. As a boy, he learned blacksmithing from his uncle. In 1795 the young James Wilson set out west across the Connecticut River to locate land for his family in Bradford, Vermont, a town located at the scenic Coos Meadows, where the Waits and Connecticut Rivers meet. Along the way, he stopped in Hanover, New Hampshire, to see a friend at Dartmouth College. According to one family story, the young man, himself eager for knowledge but without the means for securing a formal education, saw a pair of globes when he peaked through the keyhole of a locked door in one of the college buildings. The college owned three sets of globes in the 1790s. We don’t know which globes Wilson saw, but we do know that these orbs remained inaccessible to him. Wilson could not have purchased the globes, nor could he have purchased the education that would have let him study Dartmouth’s small collection. This glimpse of globes, however, fired his curiosity and fortified his desire to construct one of these unusual objects, or so the story of James Wilson goes.

Before he could take up globe making, he had to settle his family. He brought his wife and two sons to Bradford to develop his homestead, and began making axes to help pay for his land purchases. Although still working as a smith, he did not forget his interest in making a map of the world, and in 1796 he made his first globe, a large solid wooden ball covered with paper, with the continents and countries drawn in pen and ink. But Wilson would not be satisfied with his hand-drawn maps. He intended to build and market a product that could compete with the European imports, making his mark and earning his living as an American globe maker. Wilson’s first effort looked something like a globe, but it could hardly compete with the European imports. And Wilson, with his limited resources, faced formidable obstacles on his way to success as a globe maker. First, he knew very little about either geography, astronomy, or cartography. However, for a man gifted with Wilson’s capacity for curiosity, the growing number of books and newspapers in the small towns of northern New England offered many sources of information. Wilson may not have had the advantages of his friend at Dartmouth, but he did have skills and products he could exchange for knowledge. He sold off some of his farm produce and livestock and purchased for the substantial sum of $130 the eighteen volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica: Or a Dictionary of Arts, Sciences and Miscellaneous Literature, the collection of books for which he built his imposing desk and bookcase (fig. 3).

Fig. 3. James Wilson, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1797, from the collections of the Bennington Museum, Bennington, Vermont

Encyclopedias were the archetypal repository of the Enlightenment, with their compendia of all recognized knowledge; the third edition Britannica contained almost fifteen thousand pages and over five hundred plates, but Wilson would have been particularly interested in the substantial entries on globes and geography.

Wilson had his encyclopedia, but how was he to translate the information he found there onto his wooden spheres? His bookcase demonstrated his skills in woodworking, and as a trained blacksmith he was a proficient metal worker. But he knew that hand-drawn globes could not compare with European imports. In order to move beyond shoemaker Lane’s effort and produce globes his neighbors would be proud to own, Wilson had to learn to engrave his maps on copper plates. Wilson knew he needed to find a teacher more skilled at engraving than his acquaintances in southern Vermont. He set out for New Haven to find Amos Doolittle, a silversmith turned engraver, who was celebrated as the man who had engraved the maps in Jedidiah Morse’s Geography Made Easy (1784), the first geography text published in the United States.

After a brief stay in New Haven, Wilson returned to Vermont a blacksmith now turned geographer/engraver. But he still had much to learn about building globes. He began again with his original globe, covering it with papier-mâché, gluing several layers together, tracing continental outlines, cutting paper into hemispheres, and then gluing the hemispheres onto the sphere. He finished a first hand-drawn globe, but then spent nearly a year engraving a world map on a large copper plate, only to discover that he did not know how to project the meridians of the map, a flat plane, in their true proportion onto a spherical surface.

Wilson took off once again in search of cosmopolitan training to suit his cosmopolitan imagination. This time he went to see the "Father of American Geography," Jedidiah Morse himself, at Charlestown, Massachusetts. Morse told the globe maker that his first effort on a copper plate could not be salvaged. Wilson went back to Bradford, knowing he needed to obtain more copper but knowing too that his growing family needed the scarce resources he was spending learning to make globes. In the first years of the nineteenth century, balancing family demands and map-making aspiration, Wilson worked on his globe making. He built his own tools–lathes and presses–mixed his inks, shaped the spheres, and printed all of his own maps, probably relying on increasingly available atlases.

Around 1810 he produced his first globes of paper on a paper core suspended in a birch frame with turned legs. He opened a shop to manufacture these prized items and began to sell them to his neighbors in rural Vermont. Wilson charged around fifty dollars for a pair of globes: a terrestrial and a celestial one. Vermonters were likely proud to possess one of Wilson’s impressive terrestrial globes. They measured thirteen inches in diameter, and each was signed, "A NEW TERRESTRIAL GLOBE . . . By J. WILSON, VERMONT."

Wilson’s proud signature suggests that we have entered an era that celebrated homegrown and democratized knowledge (fig. 4).

Fig. 4. James Wilson, terrestrial globe, 1811, courtesy of the Library
of Congress

Men like Wilson made a livelihood providing useful knowledge and genteel commodities. American globes or provincial sideboards were material manifestations of a Village Enlightenment. Clocks or globes, for example, displayed the enlightened age’s fascination with mechanical marvels and the quest for knowledge of distant explorations, while also the refined person’s desire to display symbols of gentility.