“Never before have persons been so interested in the entire world,” gushed Popular Mechanics. Certainly the technicalities of representing a spherical planet on a map’s flat surface had never commanded such fascination. As public consciousness expanded, the details of cartographic projection mattered. The world must be seen anew, the poet Archibald MacLeish wrote, as a “round earth in which all the directions eventually meet.” “If we win this war,” he continued, “the image of the age which now is opening will be this image of a global earth, a completed sphere.”
