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Abstract: In 1902, the Krakow University academic Tadeusz Estreicher provided a translation of his paper on the Jagiellonian Globe of c.1510 to London-based Australian bibliographer Edward A. Petherick. The translation is now part of Petherick's papers, held by National Library of Australia. Although originally published in Polish by the Krakow Academy of Sciences in 1900, the publication of Estreicher's own English translation here is the first publication in English of what is still considered to be the basic study of the globe. Additional to his preface to the translation, the present author notes that the globe owes much to Martin Waldseemüller's world map of 1507, but that Estreicher's study was prepared before that map was revealed in 1901. The globe is shown to share with the map Waldseemüller's distinctive solution of representing within the 360 degrees of the Earth's circumference the location of East Asia according to both the Ptolemaic and Columban scales of longitude.
TADEUSZ ESTREICHER AND EDWARD PETHERICK
Edward A. Petherick was the Australian Commonwealth Parliamentary Archivist and a historian, collector of Australiana and bibliographer, whose name is commemorated in the Petherick Reading Room of the National Library of Australia. His papers are held in the Manuscripts Collection of the National Library of Australia2, and among them there is an English translation specially prepared for Petherick in 1900 of what is still considered to be the basic study of the earliest surviving globe on which the name America appears: the globe dating from around 1510 held by the Museum (former Library) of the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland.3
The Jagiellonian Globe measures 73.5 mm in diameter and forms the central part of an armillary sphere and clock of which it contains the mechanism (For further detail see Appendix A). The globe at the centre of the clock, containing the mechanism, consists of two gilded copperplate calottes, inscribed with the Earth's principal features as understood at that time, including a continent inscribed AMERICA*NOVITER*REPERTA (Fig. 2.). It was described in 1900 by Tadeusz Estreicher (1871-1952), a professor of chemistry at the University (Fig. 1.). Estreicher dated the globe to between 1509 and 1511.4
Estreicher's work attracted world-wide interest, and was referred to in 1911 by Petherick, who drew attention to the globe's relevance...