Before the era of satellites and radar imagery, the earth was typically depicted as a cloudless world globe, like something you'd see in an elementary school classroom. Clouds were apparently seen as scattered local, not global phenomena, and the idea that the atmosphere provides protection from a powerful sun had not yet entered the popular imagination. Above: Topps Space Card, 1958.
The Enterprise circles a globe-like Earth when it ventures from the future to 1968 in the Star Trek episode Assignment Earth. This episode, featuring Robert Lansing and Teri Garr, was a pilot that was never picked up.
The Earth in the Universal Studios mark is a cloudless globe even today. This version is from 1946-1963.
This illustration with a lovely informal lower border is from Exploring Science Four, an elementary school textbook from 1962. The accompanying text states, "a few hundred miles from the Earth there is little or no air. And so there is no fluid friction to slow down things that are moving." To make the point, this image shows the Earth's atmosphere unlike the other images in this section. Notice that the rocket has departed from Cape Canaveral.
This illustration from Exploring Space, a Little Golden Book published in 1958, strangely thwarts the convention of showing the Earth with the Northern Hemisphere at the top. The effect is so odd that it makes me wonder if the artwork is printed upside down. Using Sputnik-era language, the author refers to this satellite as a "little moon."
In the 1959 K. Gordon Murray film Santa Claus, Santa looks down on earth using a telescope. I suppose one could argue that the earth is cloudless because in the film, Santa's castle is located in the clouds. In the film, Santa teams up with Merlin to fight the devil.
