Star Chamber

On a small island in Lake Michigan, accessible to Chicago's Grant Park by a causeway, gathered last week Julius Rosenwald, Edith Rockefeller McCormick, Rufus Dawes, Max Adler and many Chicago bigwig. In a squatty rainbow granite building which looked much like a giant derby hat resting on a pedestal, they sat down, craned their necks to watch the ceiling.

Though they were indoors, they beheld the strange gyrations of the sky. Though it was but 3 p. m. they saw the sun go down, Venus, the evening star, appear. It was the opening performance of the country's first planetarium. A planetarium is a complex instrument for reproducing on an elaborate scale the motions of the 5,400 stars visible to man, and the planets of the solar system. It is a simple matter to note the motion of the moon and sun because they are large, travel rapidly relative to man. But the stars are so deliberate that in a planetarium the universe is speeded up as much as 4,000,000 times its normal rate to make star changes apparent. Last week Professor Philip Fox, who resigned from the staff of Northwestern Observatory to take charge of the new planetarium, stood on his platform in the darkened room manipulating levers and buttons, making his stars perform like trained seals. With a flashlight beam, he singled out celestial bodies in the ceiling, told their names. Once the preliminaries were over and Teacher Fox had his 2,700 stars -- all those visible from Chicago's side of the earth -- in full bloom, he set the universe into action at a dizzy pace. Earth, a brisk little body, made her yearly trip around the sun in four minutes. Neighbor Mars required 7.2 min.; poky Jupiter 47.2 min.; Saturn 2 hr., 56 min. Scurrying Venus made her lap in 148 sec.; Mercury, 58 sec. More levers were manipulated and the heavens went through a violent upheaval. Once the sky was settled again into a placid course, the audience were told that they were looking upon the heavens that Galileo studied. Next they saw the heavens by which Columbus navigated his boats; finally, the heavens as they will be centuries hence.

When the lights went up again, spectators saw the instrument which had been accomplishing these wonders. It looked like a machine on which Novelist Jules Verne and Cartoonist Rube Goldberg had collaborated. It looked most like a giant dumb-bell (14 ft. high), hinged where a giant would grip it. The two knobs were spotted with "eyes," each fitted with lenses and lights, which projected "stars" on the ceiling. In the handle was machinery governing the motions of the planets.

Chicago's planetarium is a gift from Max Adler, retired vice president of Sears, Roebuck & Co. The second one in the U. S. will be in Philadelphia, gift of Samuel S. Fels. Manhattan's American Museum of Natural History hopes to have the third. Germany, home of planetariums, has 15; Italy two; Russia, Sweden, Austria have one each.

The idea for an instrument which would dramatize astronomy, make it accessible to lay people, belongs to Professor Max Wolf, astronomer at Heidelberg University. His suggestion was executed by Carl Zeiss, Jena's great optical goods manufacturer. This original is now at the Deutsches Museum, Munich. All subsequent planetariums have been made by Zeiss. Most interesting of all is on top of the Hannoverischer Anzeiger's ten-story building at Hanover, built for publicity.

With the advent of electric lights which brighten man's night so that he is unable to see the sky, lay interest in astronomy has dwindled. The most lowly, ignorant shepherd in Christ's time knew more astronomy than any one of a thousand enlightened moderns.

The Zeiss company has several reasons for hoping that its instrument will reawaken interest in the subject. One: the Zeiss planetarium sells for $75,000. The building which houses the instrument costs much more. Chicago's cost Donor Adler about $600,000. The gift was prompted by the impression made upon him by a performance seen in Munich.

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