FELKL & SOHN, JAN, PRAGUE & ROZROK, circa 1895

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FELKL & SOHN, JAN, PRAGUE & ROZROK, circa 1895
A fine pair of 12½-inch (31.9cm.) diameter globes on tall table/short library stands;
the terrestrial ERDKUGEL (GLOBUS) Druck und Verlag von J. Felkl & Sohn Lehrmittel-Fabrik in ROSTOK bei PRAG. made up of twelve chromolithographed gores and two polar calottes laid on a hollow plaster-covered pasteboard sphere, the equatorial and Greenwich meridian graduated in individual degrees and labelled every 10°, the ecliptic graduated but unlabelled, the oceans showing ocean currents and depths in metres, steamship routes in blue dotted lines and submarine telegraph cables in red dotted lines, Antarctica with mostly projected coastline, Enderby's Land shown as an island, further islands shown off Wilke's Land, the continents with nation states strongly outlined in red, yellow, green and orange and showing rivers, mountains, towns and cities, Africa showing KONGO-STAAT and Madagascar as French, Central America showing Panama as part of Columbia;
the celestial HIMMELSGLOBUS Entworfen und herausgegeben von J. FELKL & SOHN Roztok-Prag made up of twelve chromolithographed gores and two polar calottes laid to the celestial poles on a hollow plaster-covered pasteboard sphere, the equatorial graduated in individual degrees and labelled every 10°, the ecliptic graduated in individual days of the houses of the Zodiac 0-360 and labelled every ten days, the colures not shown, a table near the cartouche showing the stars to six orders of magnitude, the constellations shown by unbroken lines connecting the stars and dotted lines as boundaries, the stars and constellation lines in blue on a green ground, the Milky Way shaded yellow, some stars labelled with Greek characters and some named;
both spheres with a stamped brass hour dial and pointer, the stamped brass meridian circle graduated in four quadrants, the celestial with a brass quadrant of altitude stamped 20°-0-90°, in a tall table stand/short library stand made of ebonised wood, the dodecahedral horizon with chromolithographed paper ring graduated in degrees, days of the month and days of the houses of the Zodiac with compass directions and a Zodiacal sigil in each corner, raised on four shaped quadrant supports to a turned central pillar with three elegant inswept legs, a brass-cased and glazed compass held on brass supports between the legs with coloured paper with wind rose and blued-steel needle -- 29in. (73.7cm.) high (2)

Special notice

No VAT will be charged on the hammer price, but VAT at 17.5% will be added to the buyer's premium which is invoiced on a VAT inclusive basis

Lot Essay

Jan Felkl (1817-1887) was born in Bohemia but moved to Prague in early adulthood where he worked in the postal office. In 1850 he acquired the Vaclav Merklas globe manufactory in Prague and in 1854 started globe-production under his own name. The cartography for these globes had been developed by Felkl himself, in collaboration with Professor Otto Delitsch of Leipzig University.
He soon became the largest producer of globes in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, with spheres of diameter 6.2, 8.6, 11.4, 15.8, 21.9, 31.9 and 47.5cm. diameter, in any of 17 different languages. He also produced telluria, lunaria and other planetaria as well as wall maps for schools and offices. His proficiency and and productivity were in part a result of a law that decreed that all schools throughout the Austro-Hungarian had to have a globe. Most of these were supplied by Felkl. By 1855 the company had produced 800 globes; in 1873 alone they produced 15,000.
In 1870, due to the poor state of Jan's wife's health, the company moved location to Roztoky near Prague, and it was there that Jan's son Christoph Siegmund (1855-1894) was made a partner in the firm in 1875, at the age of 20. Christoph Siegmund was the fifth of Felkl's nine offspring and his youngest son. Siegmund, as he was known, was regarded as an eccentric character, and none too popular with his employees; he is recorded as having kept a human skeleton standing by his bedside holding a candlestick, and a human skull on his desk as a repository for his pens.
Following Siegmund's unexpected death on a business trip in Munich in 1894, the company was run by Jan's second child and second eldest son Ferdinand (1846-1925). He was reportedly more popular than his brother, and ran the factory with greater efficiency. The firm stopped work for seven years during the First World War until starting up again in 1921 at the instigation of Czech economist Professor Albin Bráf; until the enforced hiatus they had been supplying mainly to Vienna, the Netherlands, Russian Poland and Russia, and had won awards at exhibitions in Prague in 1895 and 1908. But they would never again reach again the heights of commercial success they enjoyed in the second half of the nineteenth century and the company ceased production in 1850, going into liquidation two years later.

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