The word "globe" comes from the Latin word globus, meaning round mass or sphere. The earliest known globe was constructed by the Greek scholar Crates of Mallus in Cilicia (now Çukurova in modern-day Turkey) around 150 BC.

How did we learn the Earth was round? 

We had no space crafts to veiw the earth from space,  we had no way of flying to view the earth from miles above, and as far as the eye could see, the earth was flat.  So how did this “new” and radical thinking come about?  Well, it did not happen overnight.

In Ancient Greece, storytellers described the world as a flat disk, surrounded by the great “Ocean River”.  It was also believed that if you reached the end of the world, you would fall off or be eaten by monsters.

People started asking questions……..

If the earth is flat, why does the sun rise every morning in the east and set each night in the west?

If the earth is flat, why do the stars move in a circle at night?

If the earth is flat, why is the horizon shaped like an arc when seen from our highest mountains?

Around 250 BC, the Greek mathematician Eratosthenes noticed that a pole in the city of Alexandria, Egypt cast a shadow at noon on the summer solstice, the longest day of the year. But at the same time in Syrene, a town due south from Alexandria, a similar pole did not cast any shadow. Why was this?

Eratosthenes reasoned the sun must be shining its light at these two towns from different angles. The sun was directly above the pole in Syrene, so the pole did not cast any shadow. But the sunlight was shining toward Alexandria at an angle. This was because the earth's surface was curved, Knowing the distance between the two cities and by calculating the angle of the pole to the shadow, Eratosthenes was able to apply geometric theory to determine the size of the earth. He figured out the diameter of the earth was 7,850 miles. He was only off a little. The earth's actual diameter is about 7,926 miles at the equator.

Around this same time period, thousands of miles away, some Chinese astronomers thought the earth was a hemisphere like structure with a flat bottom surrounded by a dome shaped universe.  Other Chinese scholars thought the universe to be egg-shaped with an egg-shaped earth to be its center.  The sun, moon and other planets were thought to circle the earth. 

It was not until 1500-1600 that the first theory materialized explaining the earth is actually orbiting the sun.  Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, German astronomer Johannes Kepler and Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei put to bed the myths of the earth as the center of the universe.  The ideas of these astronomers were hardly welcomed, they were ridiculed and threatened.  Many of the religious leaders banned the books of these forward thinking scholars.

It is hard to imagine what the first globes of the earth looked like.  Australia, the Americas, entire ocreans, and hundreds of islands were unknown.  It was only 500 or 600 years ago when the kings and queens of Europe sent out their explorers.  They were truly sailing into uncharted waters.

Some facts about our amazing planet.

While spinning around like a top, in an orbit around the sun,  we are actually hurtling through space at an incredible 67,000 MPH.  It takes us 24 hours to complete a spin  and 365 days and five hours to complete our orbit.  We are the 3^rd planet from the sun which is 93,020,000 miles away from us.  Sunlight traveling at a speed of 86,000 miles per second takes approxiately 8.3 minutes to reach the earth.

Circumference: 24,901.55 miles

Diameter at Equator:  7,926.28 miles

Diameter at Poles: 7,899.80 miles

Rotation:  24 Hours

Revoultion:  Around the Sun, 365 days, 5 hours

Tilt of Axis:  23º 27”

Temperature Range:  - 128º F to 136º F

Highest Elevation: Mt. Everest, Asia 29,035 feet above sea level

Lowest Elevation: Dead Sea 1,369 feet below sea level

Age:  4.5 Billion years old  (approx)

Atmosphere:  77% Nitrogen, 21% Oxygen, 2%-other