Marvelous Maps and Measures

The world's largest rotating world.

The crown jewel of the Queens Museum is a nearly 10,000-square-foot architectural model of the city originally built for the 1964 World's Fair.

Site of a classic 19th-century physics experiment to prove the earth is rotating.

The home of aviation trailblazers, in a remote corner of the big city.

Mystic Incan rock piles three miles above sea level.

The largest known medieval map of the world.

First point in the Struve Geodetic Arc, a 19th century undertaking to measure the Earth's size and shape.

A sign at the end of the Santa Monica Pier marks the traditional end of the legendary American highway.

The earliest known map to show America, discovered by accident at a Paris bookshop.

Over 50 exquisite hand-painted Renaissance maps decorate a Medici storage room.

1513 Turkish world map, full of European state secrets and snarky commentary.

Housing the groundbreaking maps and globes of Gerard Mercator.

Almost half-way between the Equator and North Pole.

A strange machine made to evaluate the world economy using water and lots of tubes.

This Arizona observatory is famous for investigations into Martian life, and as the place humans first spotted Pluto.

The world's third-largest scale model of the planets.

An enormous, inside-out glass globe built in 1935.

Home of the Large Hadron Collider and the birthplace of the World Wide Web.