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On 21 April 1962, the Seattle World’s Truthful opened to the general public. Included in its many reveals on trendy science and the progressive future was this electrical desktop orrery. Very similar to the normal clockwork orreries of centuries previous, this unit confirmed the motions of the planets and different celestial objects, with an overlay that exposed the moons, stars, and some comets.
The US was on the time approaching “peak area.” The earlier yr, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin had develop into the primary human to achieve outer area, and on 12 September 1962 President Kennedy would announce the USA’ intention to place a person on the moon earlier than the last decade’s finish. The U.S. authorities dedicated US $9 million to assist construct a
NASA-themed science exhibit on the Seattle World’s Truthful. The truthful’s iconic landmark was the Area Needle.
All in all, it appeared like the perfect place to debut a space-age electrical orrery.
What’s an orrery?
Conventional orreries have been mechanical fashions of the photo voltaic system. These typically stunning and complicated devices have been devised by expert clockmakers as an instance how the planets and their moons moved by the photo voltaic system. Though the traditional Greeks and Romans had planetarium units that calculated astronomical positions, it wasn’t till the early 18th century that orreries took their title. Round 1713, the English nobleman Charles Boyle (grandnephew of Robert Boyle, a founder of contemporary chemistry) commissioned such a
system for his son. Boyle was the 4th Earl of Orrery. The title caught.
This 6-minute documentary, concerning the restoration of a 1758
grand orrery—so known as as a result of it contains the outer planets—is price watching as a result of it exhibits the inner gears and clockwork mechanisms:
A predecessor to the orrery was the
armillary sphere, which featured a ball representing Earth at its heart and stars rotating round it. Armillaries might be used to calculate dawn and sundown and the size of a day. That they had a very good run up till the mid-Sixteenth century, when on his deathbed Nicolaus Copernicus revealed De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres) and ushered within the heliocentric mannequin of the photo voltaic system. Armillary spheres now make fancy backyard ornaments.
In Clair Omar Musser’s desktop planetarium, every of the 9 planets moved by itself shaft and ball chain.U.S. Patent and Trademark Workplace
By the Nineteen Fifties, the normal Copernican orrery was in want of an digital improve. Clair Omar Musser, an engineer working for Scientific Area Industries, a subsidiary of Hughes Plane, took up the problem. In his 1958
U.S. patent software for a “new and improved orrery,” Musser talked about the significance of exhibiting the asteroid belt, in mild of rising curiosity in area journey past the moon and Mars. His invention would additionally enhance upon conventional orreries by including the paths of well-known comets.
A lightbulb representing the solar was on the heart of Musser’s orrery, mounted on a central shaft with coterminal tubular shafts on which the 9 planets (he included Pluto) rotated at their proportional speeds. A translucent display screen had astronomical labels and markings inscribed in phosphorus, seen solely when backlit with ultraviolet mild. The set of knobs beneath the display screen managed the illumination of the celestial our bodies by variable resistance.
Musser’s unique orrery was a hulking machine, standing over 2 meters tall and supposed to be used in museums and college school rooms. He constructed the prototype in 1958 in the course of the Worldwide Geophysical Yr. In response to the Planetarium Projector and Science Museum, fewer than 50 models have been made, and so they offered for about $6,000 (about $62,000 in the present day). Musser created the extra reasonably priced desktop mannequin proven at high for the Seattle World’s Truthful. It stood about 60 centimeters tall, concerning the dimension of a TV. (To see the desktop orrery in motion, try the 2 movies on the backside of this itemizing on the Agent Gallery Chicago.)
Who was Clair Omar Musser?
Earlier than he designed his desktop orrery, Clair Omar Musser created a bigger model, appropriate to be used in faculty school rooms and museums.
I first stumbled throughout Musser’s desktop orrery, known as the Copernican Planetarium Mannequin 500, throughout a go to to the Whipple Museum of the Historical past of Science, on the College of Cambridge. I already knew a bit about orreries, and I figured it might be simple to seek out out extra about this one and its creator. I used to be flawed.
A fast Web search on Musser returned a whole lot of 1000’s of outcomes, however virtually nothing about his engineering work. In truth, after weeks of researching, I nonetheless know little greater than the three unreferenced strains on the finish of his Wikipedia web page. In some unspecified time in the future within the Nineteen Fifties, he left a educating place at Northwestern College, moved to Southern California, and started working for Hughes Plane and possibly NASA as effectively. In response to Wikipedia, he additionally acquired a doctorate in engineering from Oxford College, though I used to be unable to trace down a replica—and even the title—of his thesis.
None of this is able to have been so odd, besides that previous to becoming a member of Hughes Plane, Musser had by no means labored as an engineer. Born in 1901 in Manheim, Pa., and introduced up within the Mennonite religion, he switched to engineering in his 50s.
The a whole lot of 1000’s of Web outcomes on Musser, it seems, all cope with the primary half of his profession, as a world-renowned marimba virtuoso and composer. I didn’t know what a marimba is, so I regarded it up: It’s a percussion instrument much like a xylophone, however with a decrease vary and a hotter, deeper timbre. Once I contacted a buddy on the College of South Carolina’s College of Music and mentioned I used to be doing analysis on Musser, I acquired an excited “Wow!” Apparently, performing Musser’s etudes for marimba is a ceremony of passage for percussion majors.
In the course of the first half of Clair Omar Musser’s profession, he was a world-renowned marimba virtuoso and composer.
Not solely was Musser an incredible performer and composer, he was additionally a designer of musical devices. He made improvements in grips, mallets, and methods, and he held greater than 40 worldwide patents on musical devices. In 1925, he launched a brand new instrument, the marimba-celeste, which had a five-octave vary that lined each the xylophone’s and the marimba’s registers. In 1929, he organized and directed a 25-piece, all-female marimba ensemble for Paramount Photos.
For most individuals, debuting an merchandise at a world’s truthful could be a once-in-a-lifetime dream, however Musser’s orrery in Seattle was decidedly second fiddle to his participation within the Chicago Century of Progress Exposition in 1933–34. There, nightly within the Corridor of Science, Musser directed a 100-piece marimba orchestra. They performed unique compositions by Musser, in addition to particular preparations of common items. After the truthful, he toured Europe with one other 100-piece marimba orchestra. They have been scheduled to carry out for the Silver Jubilee of King George V, for which Musser designed particular “coronation” devices for every member of the orchestra, however their efficiency was canceled. They did play on the 1935 Brussels World’s Truthful and different venues, earlier than returning to the USA and enjoying at Carnegie Corridor. This video captures a live performance in Paris:
What was the Celestaphone?
I don’t know why Musser left the world of music to affix Hughes Plane. In response to the discovering assist for the Clair Omar Musser Assortment on the Percussive Arts Society, he labored there for less than about 5 years. It appears, although, he had a lifelong fascination with area.
Musser started accumulating meteorites in 1936, and his interest turned broadly identified sufficient that he acquired them as items. In 1960, for example, the Soviet Union introduced him with a bit of the Sikhote-Alin meteorite. Two years later, the Philippines’ Atomic Vitality Fee contributed a siderite, a nickel-iron meteorite.
After 4 a long time of accumulating, Musser had amassed 630 kilograms of meteorites. Then, in 1977, he took about half of his assortment to a foundry and oversaw the work of melting them right down to forge 30 bars of exact sizes and tones. These “meteoric tone bars” turned the idea for a unprecedented creation: the Celestaphone.
The Celestaphone is a vibraphone with a 2.5-octave vary on a chromatic scale, from the bottom violin G to the 1,000-cycle C above treble clef. It has one sustaining pedal. It now resides on the Rhythm! Discovery Middle, in Indianapolis. Right here’s an indication of the instrument’s ethereal sound:
In response to the museum’s analysis notes on this one-of-a-kind object, it was impressed by Halley’s Comet and Musser’s mixed pursuits in music and area. Musser would have been 8 years outdated—an impressionable age—when Halley’s Comet got here into naked-eye view in 1910. It was the primary time the comet had visited because the invention of images. And on 19 Could 1910, Earth truly handed by the comet’s tail. By all accounts, it was a spectacular sight.
Musser lived to see the comet’s return in 1986, though Earth’s positioning with the solar made for a few of the worst attainable viewing situations. (My 12-year-old self remembers staring on the night time sky and not seeing the comet.)
It’s going too far to ascribe to a comet the ability to direct somebody’s profession, and but Musser positively adopted his personal eccentric orbit. However simply as celestial orbits are periodic, music for pitched percussion just like the marimba and the Celestaphone typically depends on periodic musical phrases. Maybe Musser’s planetarium, like his spectacular corpus of compositions for the marimba, speaks to a permanent fascination with the music of the spheres.
A part of a persevering with collectiontaking a look at historic artifacts that embrace the boundless potential of know-how.
An abridged model of this text seems within the October 2023 print concern as “No Atypical Orrery.”
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