Annual Report of the Smithsonian pp.745–8 Ideas for a gigantic globe at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 were unrealistic – one was for an assembly hall for ten to fifteen thousand people inside a globe supported on the shoulders of a 450 feet giant, and another was for a globe so large that a lift would be needed to reach the equator and a journey on a specially constructed spiral railway required to reach the North Pole.