Who invented the globe?

1492, the year Christopher Columbus crossed the Atlantic Ocean, martin behaim completed a globe with a diameter of 20 inches in Nuremberg. Because this globe is made according to the map in Ptolemy's geography guide, Behaim's description of Asia is much longer than it actually is eastward, so the Atlantic Ocean is much narrower than it actually is. The process of making early globes was as follows: first, long and narrow triangular wooden blocks were printed, and then these wooden blocks were cut out and stuck on wooden balls. The most famous German globe maker is the Nuremberg scholar Joan Hann Schoner. The two globes he made in the early16th century have been preserved to this day.

The globe of Kangxi Dynasty was made by Kangxi and Qing Palace in Qing Dynasty, with a height of 135cm and a diameter of 70cm. Old collection of Qing palace.

The copper ring at the waist of the sphere is a horizontal circle with four quadrants engraved on it. The copper ring intersecting the horizon is a meridian ring, engraved with 360. At the north pole of the ball, there is a time dial engraved with twelve o'clock, which is divided into the beginning and the right. Draw the ecliptic, equator and longitude and latitude on the sphere, where the equator is painted in red and the ecliptic is painted in yellow, and draw a longitude and latitude line every 10. The ecliptic is marked with the names of 24 solar terms, the Tropic of Cancer, the Antarctic Circle and the Arctic Circle. The sphere depicts the administrative regions of the mainland, with the names of some big cities, such as Beijing, Taiyuan, Ningxia, Lanzhou, Nanchang, Suzhou, Xiamen, Wuchang and Hankou in China, as well as rivers, lakes and islands, such as Tierra del Fuego in the south and Tierra del Fuego in the north of South America. The sphere is also marked with special geographical location, such as the "Great Wall" in China. The lower part of the globe shows grotesque aquatic animals, sailboats and navigation lines in the vast sea area. The globe is placed on a tripod with beautifully carved mahogany.

The production of China Globe began in the Yuan Dynasty and was supervised by Jamalidin, an astronomer from the Western Regions. Sphere reflects the distribution of land and sea on the earth's surface and belongs to primitive painting. Matteo Ricci, an Italian missionary, came to China in the Wanli period of the Ming Dynasty. In order to teach China the theory of the ancient Greek earth circle, he personally made a globe and wrote the Geographic Map of the Universe. Influenced by it, Li Zhizao, a scholar, made a globe in the thirty-first year of Wanli in Ming Dynasty (1603). In the third year of Chongzhen (1630), the court also made a globe. These globes were drawn with latitude and longitude nets, which expanded the latitude of the globe with only 27 observation points in China to the whole latitude of the earth including the equator, the Tropic of Cancer and the South Arctic Circle, and made up for the blank that China didn't know the longitude before, and marked the theory of five continents, so that people in the current dynasty could learn new knowledge about the great discovery of western geography. After the Ming Dynasty, Emperor Kangxi of the early Qing Dynasty ordered missionaries in Korea to make this globe together with some court officials. Matteo Ricci's painting method is generally used for spherical image, proportion and related text narration. The production of this instrument reflects from one side that "the theory of the earth's sphere" has been consolidated in China, and also reflects the level of China's understanding of world geography knowledge at that time.

There were only three globes in Ming and Qing Dynasties, two of which were in the Palace Museum, 1 in the British Museum in London.