Indoor Heaven

There are some sights in the world so beautiful that, on observers not incurably hardboiled, they have a physical effect like a cool plunge on a hot day. Most people are so affected by their first sight of the glow and glitter of myriads of artificial stars projected on the invisible vault of a darkened planetarium. Thus when a planetarium is opened in a U. S. city, wise news editors keep their elderly pooh-poohers in the shop and send their most impressionable young lyricists to cover the story. Thus, too, the four U. S. planetaria were made possible by gifts not from practicing esthetes but from a merchant, a soapmaker, a West Coast landowner, a socialite banker.

Chicago's Planetarium bears the name of Merchant Max Adler (Sears, Roebuck), Philadelphia's that of Soapmaker Samuel S. Fels (Fels-Naptha), Los Angeles' that of the late Griffith Jennings Griffith, rich pioneer settler. The planetarium opened with suitable pomp in Manhattan last week is named for clapper Bachelor-Banker Charles Hayden, 65, director of some 70 corporations.

The planetarium idea originated in Germany and the complicated, costly ($120,000) two-ton machine which projects the celestial images is manufactured by the Carl Zeiss Optical Works at Jena. This consists of two lens-studded globes mounted on each end of a cylindrical frame eleven feet long, is shaped like a huge dumbbell, looks like the grotesque plaything of an ogre. In effect the machine is simply an extremely versatile stereopticon. It shows the stars visible to the naked eye from anywhere on Earth, about 4,500 from any one spot; the sun, the moon and its phases, the planets, variable stars, comets, meteors, the Milky Way. It can rehearse a 24-hour maneuver of the celestial bodies in a few minutes, can show the night sky as it appeared in the remote past, as it will appear in the distant future.

President Frederick Trubee Davison of Manhattan's American Museum of Natural History financed the planetarium building by persuading RFC to take $650,000 in Planetarium Authority bonds in return for a loan, to be paid off by millions of 25-c- admissions. But the RFC would not advance funds for a foreign-bought instrument. That problem was solved, to Mr. Davison's surprise and delight, when he was handed a check for $150,000 by Bachelor-Banker Hayden, who had been religiously stirred by a planetarium performance in Chicago (TIME, Jan. 15, 1934).

When the Hayden Planetarium was opened last week, Mr. Hayden was on hand to turn over the control board keys to President Davison. "I think," said Mr. Hayden, "anything is beneficial that makes men realize that there is a much greater power in the universe than the human being on Earth, and I feel that what one sees and hears in the planetarium should make him stop, look and listen. . . ."

Mr. Davison uttered grateful words. Presently a switch clicked in the darkened room and then was heard the sound, familiar to planetarium demonstrators, of hundreds of gasps and smothered exclamations, like the far-off murmur of surf.

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