Born:
1762

Died:
1830

Biography:
The Adams family produced terrestrial and celestial floor and table globes, as well as Senex/Ferguson pocket globes. Dudley Adams continued the business until 1817, when bankruptcy forced him to sell the pocket globe plates to the Lane firm, which reissued them in updated editions. British globe maker John Addison reissued a Dudley Adams celestial globe,

circa 1818.

SPNEA’s globes were made by Dudley Adams, a member of the leading family of mathematical instrument makers in England.  Both his father and brother held royal appointments as globe and scientific and mathematical instrument makers to the King.  As leading purveyors of scientific instruments, the Adams’s shop was a favorite destination for a certain type of collector.  As one American, who admitted to an “insatiable” appetite for all types of scientific instruments, wrote to his colleague Benjamin Franklin in 1779:

When I was in London I never ventured into Nairne’s or Adams’s shops ‘til I was just ready to sail for America & hade spent all my Money not caring to expose myself to irrisistable Temptation. 

Globes like these were marks of wealth and learning.  They were expensive and in the eighteenth century had to be purchased in England.  America’s first successful globe maker, James Wilson, did not begin to sell his globes widely until early in the nineteenth century.

Carlisle, Nancy.  Cherished Possessions, A New England Legacy.  Boston: Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, 2003.