Eartha

Eartha. No, not the Eartha Kitt who replaced Julie Newmar as Catwoman on Batman (and sang Santa Baby). But Eartha (no last name), the giant spinning globe in Yarmouth.

Eartha is a 41.5 foot diameter, very detailed globe that rotates and revolves on a cantilevered arm system in the glass-walled atrium of the old Delorme (now Garmin) headquarters in Yarmouth. She is quite visible from the highway, especially when she’s lit up at night.

Tale of the Tape

• She weighs in at a petite 5,600 pounds
• 41.5 feet in diameter
• scale of 1:1,000,000 – where one inch represents sixteen miles
• Tilted on axis just like most globes (and the actual Earth) at 23.5 degrees
• Takes 18 minutes for one complete rotation and revolution cycle (though it’s said that they can crank up the speed to complete the whole thing in just one minute)
• Is built using an aluminum truss system with 6,000 pieces – called the Omni-Span™ Truss structure
• The outside features 792 plastic sections printed using satellite images, shaded relief, bathymetry (underwater mapping), and roads
• Still owns the world record for largest globe

Eartha was the brainchild of David Delorme who founded the mapping company that bears his name and still produces the very recognizable Delorme Gazetteers (find your grid, flip to that page). Pre-GPS days, just about every house in Maine seemed to have a Gazetteer or two somewhere. Swiss company Garmin bought Delorme (primarily for its satellite communication technologies) in 2016 but kept Eartha alive (and retained most of the employees). Garmin did close down the Delorme map store in Yarmouth which was always a fun stop.

David Delorme had quite the reputation and liked to think big. But I imagine his employees were a bit surprised when he asked them to design and build an oversized, functional globe and make it free for the viewing.

The globe was completed in 1998 after two years of planning and construction. Then-Governor Angus King helped David snap the final panel in place at a summer grand opening ceremony attended by hundreds of staff and guests. Then-director of R&D Mabel Ney said it took 140GB of data at the time to hold the imagery needed. Back then, that was an whopping amount of data. About a year into its life, the motors burned out and had to be replaced. Turns out, moving something that large creates quite a load on a system.

A little Googling shows that David Delorme, the self-professed “Ruminator, Cogitator, Pontificator” has kept himself busy after selling his company. Among other things, he’s been working on a robotic farm helper named BubbaBot that can plant, water, weed, and harvest for you.

Repairs and Facelifts

Eartha needs regular maintenance and cleaning. Gorham-based Great Falls Construction replaced the steel center shaft in 2012. She got a complete facelift in 2013 and got all new plastic panels. They were printed by FedEx Office in Charlestown, Mass. Each panel took 50 hours to print on an Agfa Jeti 3020 Titan UV-cured flatbed printer and 20 hours to cut on a Zünd G3 cutter. The material used was Coroplast Coro-paque Smooth, a lightweight twin wall co-polymer polypropylene. They were UV coated to withstand the steady sun in the glass-walled atrium at Delorme. The panels were shipped in 5 batches over 60 days.

Freeport-based AEC Engineering repaired the controls and motors in 2020. She got another panel refresh in 2023.

Say Hello

Eartha can be visited from 9-3pm, Monday-Friday. There is a lovely cafe in the lobby that you can visit (that replaced the Delorme map store).