EXP-032interactive essayLiveCanvas · An orthographic globe · Five thousand years

Meanwhile.

Every history you were taught runs down one column: a country, a century, one thing after another. The actual past was wide, not tall. Drag the timeline to 1877 and the globe fills up at once: the last samurai lose a hillside above Kagoshima, Edison shouts a nursery rhyme at a sheet of tinfoil in New Jersey, Victoria is proclaimed Empress of India during a famine, and twenty-two men play the first Wimbledon to pay for a broken pony roller. None of them knew about the others. That is the part the column leaves out.

History is taught one country at a time. It did not happen that way.

Drag the timeline to a year and the globe fills with everything else that was going on. Drag the globe to turn it, tap a mark to read it, or work down the list underneath.

1877

Tap a mark, or pick one from the list

The year17 entries · within 6 years

Meanwhile, in 1877

All at once

Bench notes

The argument: A timeline is a list, and a list has one dimension. That is why history taught in columns produces people who can date the American Civil War and have no idea what was happening in China at the time, which was the deadliest war of the entire century. Put the same records on a sphere and the missing dimension comes back: not when, but where else. The globe is not decoration here. It is the second axis the list could not hold.
The scale is warped, on purpose: The slider is not linear. Five thousand years spread evenly would spend nine tenths of the track on the part with a dozen entries in it, and the last two centuries, where almost everything anyone wrote down happened, would be a millimetre wide. So the track is cut into six segments and each gets a share of the width proportional to how much is in it and how precisely we can date it. The chart above the slider is the honest version of that: it draws how lumpy the record actually is, and the lump is at the right-hand end.
How wide a year is: Ask for 1877 and you get 1877, give or take four years. Ask for 2000 BCE and the window opens to a hundred and twenty, because nothing that old is dated to a year and pretending otherwise would be the real distortion. The window is written on the readout at every position, so the piece never quietly implies a precision it does not have.
Coastlines, not borders: There are no countries drawn on this globe, and that is a judgment rather than an economy. A border is the most anachronistic thing you could put on a map you can drag to 1450: nearly every line on a modern one is younger than most of the entries here, and several were drawn in a room in Berlin in 1884 by men who had not been to the places. Coastlines have barely moved in five thousand years, so coastlines are what it draws.
The craft: No 3D library. The globe is one 2D canvas and an orthographic projection written by hand, which is the projection every drawn globe uses: no perspective, a true circle at the edge, and the far side simply absent. The whole planet is 122 outlines and 2,181 points, encoded as eight kilobytes of text, about a hundredth of what the source map costs. The draw loop is dirty-flagged, so a globe nobody is touching burns nothing at all.
The manners: The list underneath is not a fallback, it is the same instrument: everything the globe can show, reachable with a keyboard and readable on a phone, and picking from it turns the planet to the place. The canvas claims a drag only once it is clearly sideways, so scrolling past it on a phone always works. With reduced motion on, every control stays and the globe simply stops drifting on its own.
What it is not: A complete record. Two hundred and seventy-two entries cannot be, and any list of what mattered is an argument about what mattered. The rule this one is built on is that every century has to pull from more than one continent, and a year that returns five European entries and nothing else is a bug in the data rather than a fact about the past.