Ellen Eliza Fitz facts for kids

Ellen Eliza Fitz was an American inventor known for her design for a globe mounting system, the Fitz globe.

Early life

Ellen Eliza Fitz was born in 1835 in Kingston, New Hampshire to Asa and Susan Fitz. Fitz grew up in Lynnfield and Newton, Massachusetts, graduated from West Newton State Normal school, and worked as a music teacher in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Fitz spent most of her adult life in St. John, New Brunswick, Canada where she served as an American governess.

The Fitz Globe

Fitz received a patent for her globe, known as a Fitz Globe, in 1875.

Fitz invented a globe mounting device as an educational tool to assist students in visualizing the Earth’s daily rotation and annual revolution. The Fitz globe is a terrestrial globe that is surmounted by an hour pointer and encircled within two parallel brass bands that serve as daylight/twilight bands. The globe was raised on a patented Fitz turntable base that is engraved with a calendar. The globe demonstrates the changing daylight, twilight, and seasons around the globe and throughout the year. Moreover, to promote the study of physical geography, the Fitz globe shows ocean currents (white lines) and average isotherms (lines of equal temperature) for January (blue lines) and July (red lines). The globe was patented by Fitz in 1875.

The mounted globe was produced by a school and college textbooks publisher, Ginn & Heath, and displayed at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876. Along with the globe, Fitz published “Handbook of the Terrestrial Glove or Guide to Fitz’s New Method of Mounting and Operating Gloves,” explaining and promoting her unique mounting system for education. This book was a bestseller and was printed four times, first in 1876, with subsequent editions in 1878, 1880, and 1888. An 1876 review of the book noted "it seems impossible to speak too favorably" of the book, and Publisher's Weekly noted that the globe was "likely to revolutionize the popular notion that woman has no inventive genius".

Fitz designed a second globe allowing people to understand the location of the stars. She received a patent for this globe in 1882 (patent #263,886).

Last days

Ellen Eliza Fitz passed away on October 12, 1886, in Watertown, Massachusetts.