Accession No
6238
Brief Description
6-inch globe of the Planet Mars, produced by Camille Flammarion after the map of Eugene Antoniadi, made by E. Bertaux, French, c. 1898
Origin
France; Paris
Maker
Flammarion, Camille [publisher] Bertaux, E. [maker]
Class
astronomy; demonstration
Earliest Date
1896
Latest Date
1900
Inscription Date
Material
wood (unknown type, ebonized); paint; paper; metal (brass)
Dimensions
325mm high; 150mm diameter globe
Special Collection
Provenance
Purchased with Wh. 6238 from Tesseract, Box 151, Hastings-on-Hudson, New York 10706, U.S.A. from 07/07/2008. Purchased in a pair with Wh. 6237.
Inscription
Globe Geographique
de la Planete
MARS
d’apres
CAMILLE FLAMMARION
par E. Antoniadi
E. Bertaux Editeur, paris
Description Notes
6-inch globe of the Planet Mars, produced by Camille Flammarion after the map of Eugene Antoniadi, made by E. Bertaux, French, c. 1898.
Globe comprises of 12 gores, plus two polar calottes, printed browns and blacks on dark tan, with the sphere mounted on a turned ebonized wood stand with brass fittings.
The cartography of Mars shown is based on the observations made by Camille Flammarion and Eugene Antoniadi at Flammarion’s Parisian observatory during the 1880s and 1890s, and is fully named and overlaid with a Martian system of latitude and longitude. Several areas demonstrate changeable observable conditions, denoted by dotted lines indicating the shape of a feature at a given year (labelled - earliest is 1864-1877, latest is 1896). Flammarion subscribed to the maritime view of Mars, with dark areas seas and light areas continents. Flammarion was also a supporter of the idea of intelligent life on Mars, and this globe contains numerous straight, thin ‘canals’, which Flammarion believed demonstrated irrigation constructions built by Martians. The nomenclature is Flammarion’s, differing from the previously employed nomenclature of the Englishman Richard Proctor.
Complete.
References
Events
Description
The famous French populariser of science Nicolas Camille Flammarion (1842–1925) produced this globe at the end of the nineteenth century. It is based on the maps produced by Flammarion and his assistant Eugene Michael Antoniadi (1870–1944) at Flammarion’s private observatory in Paris during the 1880s and 1890s.
An author of popular books on astronomy, Flammarion was a firm believer in the idea of intelligent life existing on Mars. Further more, Flammarion argued that such life would be more intelligent than humans, as Mars—being further from the Sun—was an older planet than the Earth. Support for such a theory appeared to arrive in 1877 when the eminent Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli (1835–1910) first reported his observations of ‘canals’ on the surface of Mars. Flammarion embraced these features as irrigation channels constructed by Martians and included numerous narrow and straight features on his own maps produced in the 1880s and 1890s.
The idea of canals, promoted by Flammarion and the American astronomer Percival Lowell (1855–1916), soon became a widely accepted feature of the Red Planet’s cartography and continued to appear in representations of the planet right up until the first NASA probes surveyed the surface in 1965.
08/12/2008
Created by: Joshua Nall on 08/12/2008
FM:46711
Images (Click to view full size):
