Inside the World of 1935 at the Mapparium

Inside the Mary Baker Eddy Library on Massachusetts Avenue is a three-story globe you can walk through. The Mapparium opened in 1935, designed by the architect Chester Lindsay Churchill and built from 608 stained-glass panels. A glass bridge about thirty feet long crosses its middle, so the world curves around you on every side. Because your eye sits the same distance from every point on the surface, the continents appear in their true proportions, without the distortion of a flat map. The borders were never updated. They follow Rand McNally political maps of 1934, so the room still shows the countries and colonial borders of that year, many of them long gone. The hard spherical glass also makes the room a whispering gallery: stand at one end of the bridge and speak softly, and someone at the other end hears you clearly.