The videos in the websites below, are a great way.....
to take a break during your day!
The Discovery Channel - Planet Earth
Just wondering....
When was the 1st globe created?
The Erdapfel (German: earth apple) produced by Martin Behaim in 1492 is considered to be one of the first terrestrial globes ever made. It is constructed of a metal ball overlaid with a map painted by Georg Glockendon.
The Americas are not included yet, as Columbus returned no sooner than March 1493 to Europe. The globe shows a rather enlarged Eurasian continent and an empty ocean between Europe and Asia. The mythical island of Saint Brendan is included. Japan and Asian island are disproportionately large.
The idea to call the globe "apple" may be related to the Reichsapfel ("Imperial Apple", Globus cruciger) which was also kept in Nuremberg along with the Imperial Regalia (Reichskleinodien).
From its creation until early in the 16th century, it stood in a reception room in the Nuremberg town hall. After that time it was held by the Behaim family. In 1907, it was transferred to the Germanic Museum in Nuremberg
When were the Americas 1st mentioned on a map?
As the U.S. Library of Congress readies the first map to use the name "America" for its public debut, some researchers are wondering where in the world the mapmaker got his information.
The world map, created by German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller in 1507, is the first document to show a separate Western Hemisphere and label the Pacific Ocean as its own body of water.
Before he drew the document, Waldseemüller had pored over notes from explorers Christopher Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci, as well as other unknown Portuguese and Spanish sources, according to a statement from the Library of Congress. "It represented a modern view of the world," the statement said.
But some scholars are confused as to how the mapmaker knew the Pacific Ocean existed years before explorers found it, and how he depicted South America so accurately.
"From the writings of Vespucci you couldn't have prepared [this] map," John Hebert, chief of the geography and map division at the library. It's also unclear why Waldseemüller stopped using the name "America" in later maps, referring to the land only as "terra incognita," or "unknown land," The German scholar did mistakenly name the new lands America after Vespucci's first name, thinking he—not Columbus—had discovered them, according to the library. Waldseemüller later had misgivings about the error, the Library of Congress's Hebert told the Reuters news service.
The map was rediscovered in 1901 after spending 400 years lost in the library of a German castle.
In 2003 the Library of Congress purchased the so-called crown jewel of cartography for ten million U.S. dollars from Germany's Prince Johannes Waldburg-Wolfegg
