Slated Outline Activity Globe [Military Planning]: Denoyer-Geppert Co., c.1939

• Title: Slated Outline Activity Globe [Military Planning]
• Author: Denoyer-Geppert Co
• Date: c.1939
• Condition: Excellent
• Inches:  x  
• Centimeters:  x 
• Product ID: 308736

Forged in Chicago for the war effort, the 16-inch Denoyer-Geppert globe is a genuine piece of military hardware — not a classroom ornament. Built from hollow-spun steel rather than the plasterboard core of the company's school globes, it was engineered to take a beating and keep working, spinning in a heavy cast-iron meridian and base designed to stay rock-steady while officers leaned in and marked it up.

What makes it extraordinary is the map itself, or rather the deliberate absence of one. The oceans are finished in flat blue, the continents laid down in solid black, and the coastlines picked out in a single yellow line — and that is all. No place names, no borders, no clutter. The surface is, by design, a blank slate: a three-dimensional chalkboard on which a planning officer could trace a bomber's flight path, plot a naval blockade, track an advancing weather front, or map a campaign, then wipe it clean and start over. The equator graduated in degrees for real plotting.

This was no field improvisation. Denoyer-Geppert built the slated globe as a product line of its own, formalizing its use in Otto E. Geppert's 1955 Suggestions for Use of the Slated Outline Globe. It became "the favored globe at many military bases, as officers could write on it with chalk — hence the name, 'Slated Outline Activity Globe' and it went on to serve "at military academies… and at NASA". Industrial, interactive, and stripped to its function, it's a Machine-Age object that was meant to be touched — and that carries the literal trace of the hands that planned with it.

Background on Creator

Founded in Chicago in 1916 by geographer L. Philip Denoyer and salesman Otto E. Geppert, Denoyer-Geppert grew into one of America's foremost manufacturers of maps, globes, and visual-education equipment. From its sprawling plant at 5235 N. Ravenswood Avenue in the Edgewater neighborhood — the former Swedish-American Telephone Company building, now on the National Register of Historic Places — the firm served two markets from one factory: mass-market Cartocraft school globes for classrooms across the country, and purpose-built industrial and military apparatus, including the spun-steel slated "Activity" globes used for campaign and flight-path planning at military bases, academies, and NASA. By the late 1930s annual sales topped $600,000 and reached $6 million by 1964. Purchased by Times Mirror in 1967, the firm won a 1969 NASA contract to build 200 commemorative Apollo 10 lunar globes before selling its map-and-globe assets to Rand McNally in 1984.