Did you See....?...the brilliant BBC documentary, The Seven Ages of Britain, presented by David Dimbleby, currently being repeated on BBC4 on Thursday nights at 7:30 p.m.?
Last night (30th September) it was "The Age of Power". This programme revealed the Tudor dynasty through some of the art treasures of the time. A major feature of the Elizabethan reign was the devotion of Elizabeth I's subjects to their Queen, to the extent that they were prepared to sail across the oceans to strange and distant lands to find new, exotic treasures to offer her as tokens of their devotion.
David Dimbleby talked about the famous British map maker, Emery Molyneux, who sailed with Drake on the first ever circumnavigation of the earth. On his return he made 2 globes for Queen Elizabeth, with beautifully-illustrated maps that revealed the very latest thinking at the time about what the world looked like.
In the programme, Dimbleby studies these globes in close up detail and explains how they were made using layers of paper glued together with plasterboard to make the sphere, then cutting the paper map like segments of an orange and glueing it around the sphere.
Did you Know....?....that very little has changed today in the way that our traditional globes are made. Our spheres are made of fibreboard, which is pressed layers of paper, and the map is still cut into segments like the segments of an orange and glued to the sphere, making little score marks as they go to ease it around the curved surface of the sphere.
Just thought you might like to know. Sue.
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