Circumnavigating the Wilson Globe Transcript

Back to Circumnavigating the Wilson Globe episode.

Teresa Greene: The story with James Wilson goes that he didn’t even know how to read. And he taught himself how to make a globe from scratch without ever looking at a map to engrave without ever having seen art. He looked at a globe through a keyhole, and he knew how to make a globe.

Amanda: This is Before Your Time, presented by the Vermont Historical Society and Vermont Humanities. Every episode, we go inside the stacks at the Vermont Historical Society to look at an object from their permanent collection that tells us something unique about our state. Then we take a closer look at the people, the events, or the ideas that surround each artifact.

The objects that we’re looking at for these episodes are maps. Each one represents a different moment in Vermont, with questions that spiral out and persist to our present day.

Today’s map, actually, isn’t a map at all. It’s a globe. For this series, we’ve interviewed a lot of experts about the maps we’re talking about. For this globe, which is a hugely important object in the history of Vermont, the experts are at the Vermont Historical Society.

Teresa: Do we want to talk more about technique or about, like, connoisseurship?

Amanda: Collections Manager Teresa Greene and myself – Amanda Gustin, Director of Collections and Access – spent almost two years studying James Wilson and his globes.

Okay, so I guess I’ll talk through it the way that I look through an object. So when I am looking at a new object, the first things that I, I clock usually are. Techniques or artistic styles that are specific to a time period and can help narrow down when it was made.

Amanda: The globe we’re looking at was made in 1810, and the label printed on the side says “A NEW / TERRESTRIAL GLOBE, / on which the / TRACTS and NEW DISCOVERIES / are laid down / from the Accurate Observations / made by / Cap.t. Cook, Furneux, Phipps & C. / By J. WILSON, VERMONT.”

Theresa: For the globe. It’s a little bit easier because it has a a label right on it. It doesn’t have a date on it, but we know where it was made and who made it, because that’s printed right on the side.

Amanda: The whole project started with this one object that we’re talking about in this episode: a globe made by a man named James Wilson of Bradford, Vermont.

Amanda: The whole project started with this one object that we’re talking about in this episode: a globe made by a man named James Wilson of Bradford. It’s hardly an obscure object, like some of the other maps we’ve looked at. This globe, and the man who made it, are among the most famous stories in early Vermont history. There’s a sign at the Bradford town line, actually, that advertises that this small Vermont town is the origin of the first American globe.

Teresa: So when we first started the project, we were looking at our globe kind of in a vacuum. We looked at every part of of our globes that we could even imagine was significant in any way. We compared it to our later globes that were made by the company. In 1831. And compared to the changes that happened over time and after we had seen all the we could see from ours, we started comparing it to Globes from other public collections. And at that point, we started to get a feel for what things were the same in all of them and what things were a little bit different. And those things that are a little bit different are the ones that really tell us more about the Globes themselves.

Amanda: So let’s start at the beginning. What is a globe? In short, it’s a way of showing the world in three dimensions by attaching a map to a sphere. That way you’re actually seeing all the oceans and land masses in their appropriate relative size and location.

Amanda: Contrary to what you may have learned in elementary school, people knew the world was round long before Christopher Columbus, and there are examples of globes that are hundreds of years old. Starting in the 18^th century, workshops in Europe began producing them for sale, making them more accessible than they had been – but still very expensive.

Teresa: You can look at things like materials and construction techniques. For an object like this, you would find techniques by looking at the tool marks on the wood or the seams in the paper, the way that the glue color has changed. The brass ring around it, It’s it’s hand engraved. It’s not stamped in by a machine. And you can tell that by looking at the the numbers and comparing the four on one side to the four on the other, and seeing that there are slight differences, that the two to the two. Stuff like that, to really see that it was made by a human being and not a machine.

Amanda: The question that actually started our research was: when exactly was this globe made, and how can we tell? See, James Wilson didn’t just make this one globe. He started a whole manufacturing business making globes that continued for fifty years.

Amanda: This globe has been in the collections of the Vermont Historical Society since 1923. It’s among our earliest documented artifacts. And in that time, people have written and published about it, and given it a few different dates of creation. Sometimes 1814, sometimes 1811, sometimes 1817. Wilson’s later globes all had dates on them, but not this one. The last time anyone seriously tried to study the globe was in the 1960s – and that historian relied on a lot of sources that we wouldn’t use for doing history today.

Amanda: So we went back to the drawing board on everything – and I mean everything.

Teresa: We. Wrote down a list of things that we wanted to make sure to compare on each globe, which included that one length that doesn’t match the others. A couple of mistakes within the maps so that we could try to find an original print source that he may have been copying and the weight and the size. We found some significant weight differences between a lot of them, and after we finished the physical examinations, we were able to get several of them together and an x rayed them. And that was really helpful because some of them had been dropped and those ones were great because you can see the construction methods and the materials a lot better on ours.

Amanda: We traveled across four different states and looked at all the globes that we could – nineteen in person – and closely examined photographs of the globes that we couldn’t see in person. There were only three others like our globe, without dates – one in Bennington, one in Bradford, and one at Harvard. Ultimately, we concluded that our globe was among the very first ones ever made, either in late 1809 or early 1810.

We don’t have too many clear and hard facts about Wilson, actually. We know he was born in 1763 in New Hampshire, into a large family. He probably worked mostly as a farmer, and some sources say he apprenticed for a little while as a blacksmith. In the 1790s, he moved his family to Bradford, Vermont.

It seems that it was around that time that he embarked on the great obsession of his life: globes. The story goes that he visited a friend at Dartmouth College, and while there, had the chance to see one of the new college’s most prized possessions: a globe recently imported from England. We don’t know which globe he saw, or who the friend was, but we do know that he must have started pretty soon with experimenting to make a globe of his own.

Teresa: The story with James Wilson goes that he didn’t even know how to read. Aand he taught himself how to make a globe from scratch without ever looking at a map to engrave without ever having seen art. He looked at a globe through a keyhole, and he knew how to make a globe.

Amanda: A lot of times people tell the story it’s really just that simple: he saw a globe once, he experimented for fifteen or so years, and then this magical object appeared. But history is never that easy.

Teresa: And the story is a lot more complicated than that and likely involved a lot more people.

Susan Schulten is a professor of history at the University of Denver, and an expert on the history of globes and maps.

Susan: Americans may assert their independence right in the late 18th century, but it’s another thing to actually create things out of whole cloth.

Amanda: She was an early expert that we consulted with on our project, and graciously agreed to come back to talk to us again for the podcast.

Susan: And so in the geography texts, you often see them as sort of copies of European Goldsmith or Guthrie or some of the other big textbooks. And I suspect that James Wilson is part of that same phenomenon, right. That he he’s going to have to use something. And chances are it’s going to be produce something produced in Europe. But he may be able to adapt it to its own, his own purposes.

Amanda: So we have two things happening here: James Wilson is taking part in a much bigger conversation about the new project that is American democracy, and he’s also part of a network of artisans, manufacturers, and crafters in the Upper Valley of Vermont that began to emerge in the very first years of the 19^th century.

Susan: I think James Wilson is doing what two other individuals are doing at that time. And I’m thinking of Noah Webster, who created the first sort of American lexicon of English, and Jedediah Morse, who was very, very determined to make an American version of geography. I mean, a textbook of geography. And so Wilson Wilson is very much like Webster and Morse in the sense that these men are, to your point, thinking in the 1790s very carefully about creating and proliferating American versions of knowledge.

And so Jedediah Morse doesn’t want American schoolboys and schoolgirls to be reading European created geographies of the world or of the United States. He thinks geography needs to be authored by Americans, similar for Webster, and I think of Wilson very much in that same vein of wanting to create a commercially competitive globe that will rival those coming out of Europe, but very much for particular reasons, not just to make a profit.