The name Replogle has been synonymous with globes since the company’s founding in 1930.  The company is named after founder Luther I. Replogle, a onetime school supplies salesman that saw a need for globes in every home.

Luther and his wife Elizabeth Replogle, known as “Rep” and “Bets”, started the company in their apartment and an adjacent basement with $500 borrowed from friends.  After a rocky start during the dawn of the Great Depression, the new company’s first big break came when the eminent Chicago retailer, Marshall Field and Company (Now part of Macy’s) selected Replogle to produce a globe for the Chicago Century of Progress World’s Fair in 1933.

After a lull in business prior to the U.S. entry into WWII (1938 through 1941), the new company kept growing to meet the need for globes.  Later as the nation fought, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt asked families to have a map or globe handy during his radio addresses to the nation.  The changes in borders as a result of the war and the economic boom times after WWII kept the demand for globes growing well into the 1970s.

When the company started, Replogle made globes by buying printed globe sheets from another company, cutting them into strips called gores, and painstakingly hand fitting the gores together and assembling the globes by hand.   As the company grew, the hand crafted tradition continued, and cartographers hired by Luther then created exclusive maps to be printed for our globes.  Special heated forming presses were purchased to form the globes into spheres and Replogle could then make thousands of globes. The company continues to make hand covered globes the old fashioned way, but globes made from the new process are more economical and allow most anyone to afford a globe.