WALL TOWNSHIP – The InfoAge Science and History Museums welcomed Princeton University’s Guyot Globe – over six feet in diameter and historic for its geophysical accuracy of Earth’s features – to its space exploration center this week.
InfoAge Science and History Museums, on Marconi Road, have a vital connection to Earth and space studies, as the location is home to the very first signal sent from the Earth to the moon and back again, as part of the U.S. Army’s Project Diana at Fort Monmouth in January of 1946.
The globe, one of only a few of its kind built, was first constructed in 1957, and donated to the Princeton University Geosciences Department by Princeton alumni Carl M. Loeb Jr. and Henry A. Loeb, according to the keynote speaker at the event, Jason E. VanHorn, a professor of Geography at Calvin University in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The globe has sat in the university’s Guyot Hall since, until reaching its new home at InfoAge.
“The geographers and artists had set out to make the most accurate physical relief globe ever to be made by hand, and they did it to an incredible precision,” VanHorn said.
VanHorn says that as far as he can tell from expansive research and travel to different geophysical globe sites, the globe that now sits at InfoAge is one of only four still-existing giant hard-shell globes that were created at the time.
Laurel Goodell, an instructional laboratory manager of the Geosciences department at Princeton, spoke about the initial globe dedication at Princeton University in 1959.
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