Construction ran from 1650 to 1664. The scientific brain was Adam Olearius, the duke's court scholar and librarian, a mathematician who had travelled with a Holstein embassy to Persia and come home famous for the book he wrote about it. The hands belonged to Andreas Bösch, a gunsmith recruited from Limburg an der Lahn, working with a shifting crew of seven to nine craftsmen — blacksmiths, locksmiths, clockmakers, engravers, carpenters, painters. The frame was iron — twenty-four meridian rings built as T-section beams — sheathed in copper plate, roughly three metres across. Its axis was a wrought-iron shaft resting on a millstone below and fixed to a ceiling beam above, tilted at 54°30′: the latitude of Schleswig. The globe did not show a generic sky, but the sky as it stood over this particular town.

The globe needed a building, and the building came first. Gottorf's Neuwerk garden — the "new work" — was laid out from 1637 on terraces descending toward a pond crowned by a Hercules figure, and the globe seems to have been in the plan from near the start. Not until 1650 did Frederick begin the pavilion at the garden's foot. It took seven years: a symmetrical four-storey brick block with extensions on every side, a roof terrace, and a taller northern tower capped with a copper onion dome. A semicircular wall swept down toward the Hercules pond, enclosing a formal globe garden. Olearius was most likely the architect too, and on the doors of the globe hall hung portraits of Copernicus and Tycho Brahe, the two authorities the age argued over.

Twelve people could sit around the central table. A single occupant could crank the sphere by hand and race a full day past in about a quarter of an hour, or let the water drive it and watch nothing appear to happen. Internal gearing tracked the Sun's annual movement and drove a world clock showing where on Earth it was noon and where midnight. Astronomically the thing was already old-fashioned when it was finished — an enormous working model of Ptolemy's geocentric cosmos — but as an experience it was entirely new. Every earlier globe was something you stood outside and looked at. This one put the observer inside. When not in use the hatch was shut with a cover bearing the Gottorf arms and the globe draped in heavy green wool.

Frederick III died in 1659, during the Second Northern War, with the sphere unfinished, and work stopped. His son Christian Albrecht restarted it and saw the globe finished in 1664 — five years after the man whose idea it was had died. Gottorf kept its wonder for barely half a century.

In July 1713 the globe was ordered packed and sent to Peter the Great. How voluntary the gift was remains disputed; the duchy was small, the Great Northern War was on, and Russia had leverage. It travelled by way of Pillau, Riga and Reval, reaching Saint Petersburg in 1717. Back at Gottorf the empty pavilion lost its purpose, and in 1768–69 it was pulled down. In Russia the globe went into the Kunstkamera — where, in 1747, a fire destroyed roughly ninety-five percent of it. What survived was a single element: the entry door, which happened to be stored in a cellar. Everything else was rebuilt between 1748 and 1750 under the instrument maker Benjamin Scott, and the surface map was not completed until 1790, by the astronomer Friedrich Theodor von Schubert. It still stands in the Kunstkamera, mostly eighteenth-century material wrapped around a seventeenth-century door.

Schleswig got its globe back the only way left: by making another. A replica opened at Schloss Gottorf in May 2005, in a new globe house designed by the Berlin practice Hillmer & Sattler und Albrecht and funded by the Hermann Reemtsma Stiftung, with the baroque garden restored around it through further foundation money. Reconstructing the building was possible partly thanks to bureaucracy: a 1708 inventory of the ducal residence, drawn up for taxation, described Gottorf's buildings and gardens in enough detail to fill the gaps the surviving drawings left. Since 2019 the state museums of Schleswig-Holstein have run an exhibition there, with a virtual-reality film in which Olearius and Frederick III explain their machine against the backdrop of the Thirty Years' War; a 360-degree online tour followed in 2020. There are now two Gottorf globes, one in Schleswig and one in Saint Petersburg. Neither is entirely original.