And the “45×90 point” is just west of Wausau, WI (near Marathon)… when I first learned my latitude and longitude, I was awestruck by how close to 45ºN/90ºW it was. “Wait, that means I’m almost in the exact center of… what would it be… the upper half of the Western Hemisphere!”
No one else cared.
So pre-GPS, I used to ride around, wondering if I was at the spot or not (someone eventually put up a plaque, but had the wrong place… now there’s a monument and it’s a bigger deal).
It’s near a creepy should-be-haunted monastery, where our church has retreats… which has absolutely nothing to do with this subject.
Wow, I had no idea the 45×90 point was that close to my grandparents’ farm. Checking it out on Google Maps, it’s almost, but not quite, due north of them, about 25 miles away. Pretty much a strait shot up County Highway M.
Not mine, but my grandmother lived on Canada’s East coast, and told a story about a couple of WW2 British pilot trainees (Canada had a lot of them because of the much lower risk of meeting a hostile Luftwaffe fighter on training flights) who were hosted in her house. They announced one day that they had a three-day weekend pass and were thinking of taking the train to see the Rocky Mountains they had heard so much about. She had to gently break it to them that they were closer to home than to the Rockies.
I remember when I first went to Carnaval in Rio De Janeiro with my Brazilian friend, I casually asked my friend if we should take a quick excursion to the Amazon. He laughed and said it was too far. The 2nd part of our trip was in Recife, so I asked if we might take the excursion then. Same laugh. Yeah, Brazil is big.
ETA: For some reason, I thought Rio de Janeiro (or “January River”) referred to the Amazon.
Montana is about 7% larger than Germany, but there are about 80 times as many people in the latter. I mean, talk about crowded. I am not sure that American Westerners fully appreciate their lebensraum.
which I’ve just spent a chunk of this day trying to date. And I think I’ve got it down to within a year; unless I’m doing something wrong.
Said globe shows French West Africa; which existed from 1895 to 1958, or sort of to 1959.
Said globe shows Israel. You have to look really hard (Israel’s tiny) but it’s definitely there. Modern Israel was established in May 1948.
And said globe shows one Germany. East and West Germany weren’t reunited until 1990; way too late for French West Africa. But while Germany was more or less chopped into pieces in 1945 – which would seem to present the impossibility of a globe produced by 1945 but also not before 1948 – the two states generally called West and East Germany weren’t officially established until May and October, respectively, of 1949.
So I think what I have here is a globe produced, or at least designed, between May 1948 and May, or possibly October, 1949. Comments?
It may be as late as the 1950s. The partition of Germany was considered by almost everybody as a temporary interval until Adenauer rejected the terms of the Stalin Note in 1952. Even in 1960, the two Germanys sent a combined team to the Tokyo Olympics. You can find atlas maps from, say, 1950, with a united Germany.
Ah. So the actual cutoff may be the end of French West Africa; and the globe dates to somewhere between 1948 and 1960, though probably to between 1948 and 1952.
ETA: There may be other useful clues on there, of course. I just don’t know what they are.
The Eastern Shore refers to the eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay; St. Michaels is on the Eastern Shore, Ocean City (MD) is on the Atlantic coast. I can’t document it, but a whole slew of Marylanders seem to consider the entire Delmarva peninsula The Eastern Shore. I claim the excuse of being 4 years old and uninformed at the time I believed it. And in a hurry to get to the beach – you know how 4 year olds are.
I tried that; but I wound up at 1935-40, which is obviously not right, because Israel.
I might have followed something in the chart wrong, or missed something on the globe – it’s about 12" diameter, which means place names and some entire countries are tiny.
@Babale, I’ll take a look at that. Thanks, both of you.
