A Geographical Lottery Game

The cards are hand-coloured and each has 8 numbered tiles that can be lifted out to reveal a black and white image of a significant feature of the region, often an animal or plant (Image 2). Where the same animal is shown on different cards the creature is generally depicted in a different pose, suggesting that the manufacturer was happy to spend money on producing a new image. Detail is also impressive on the globe itself - many of the squares are numbered, some of which correspond to those on the game cards. Geographical features including Tropics, isotherms and regional seasonal winds are shown, as are man-made features such as prominent buildings.

The level of detail and the hand colouring suggest that this was an expensive toy, either for the child of a wealthy family or perhaps for a schoolroom, where a larger group could have made full use of the 12 cards.

This set has no maker's inscription, but we can use features of the globe and game cards to tell us approximately when it was made. The fact that the globe was designed to teach children about diverse aspects of foreign lands means that we have clues from cultural, as well as cartographic, details. For example, the globe shows the English and French transatlantic telegraph cables reaching across to Cape Cod in America via the island of St Pierre. The French cable was laid in 1879, so the globe must have been made after this date.

Looking at the game cards can help us to pin down the date more precisely. Included on the cards are the Australian flag and the Flatiron building in New York (Image 3). The Australian flag was chosen in 1901, and the distinctively shaped Flatiron building was completed in 1902, so we can assume that the set was made soon after this. However, neither the globe nor the cards show the Vietnam Canal, built in 1914, so the set is likely to date from before this time. Additionally, the meridian of zero longitude on the globe passes through Paris, rather than Greenwich. While French delegates attended the International Meridian Conference of 1884, at which Greenwich was settled upon as the site of the Prime Meridian, France declined to take up the convention until 1911. From this evidence we can get a fairly narrow estimate for the date of production of between 1902 and 1911.

Katie Taylor

Katie Taylor, 'A geographical lottery game', Explore Whipple Collections, Whipple Museum of the History of Science, University of Cambridge, 2009.

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