On 21 April 1962, the Seattle World’s Truthful opened to the general public. Included in its many displays on fashionable 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 house.” The earlier yr, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin had develop into the primary human to succeed in outer house, 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 usually stunning and complicated devices have been devised by expert clockmakers as an example how the planets and their moons moved by way of the photo voltaic system. Though the traditional Greeks and Romans had planetarium gadgets that calculated astronomical positions, it wasn’t till the early 18th century that orreries took their identify. Round 1713, the English nobleman Charles Boyle (grandnephew of Robert Boyle, a founder of recent chemistry) commissioned such a
device for his son. Boyle was the 4th Earl of Orrery. The identify caught.
This 6-minute documentary, in regards to the restoration of a 1758
grand orrery—so referred to as as a result of it consists of the outer planets—is price watching as a result of it reveals the interior 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. They’d a superb run up till the mid-Sixteenth century, when on his deathbed Nicolaus Copernicus printed 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 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 application for a “new and improved orrery,” Musser talked about the significance of exhibiting the asteroid belt, in mild of rising curiosity in house 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 way of variable resistance.
Musser’s unique orrery was a hulking machine, standing over 2 meters tall and supposed to be used in museums and university classrooms. He constructed the prototype in 1958 in the course of the Worldwide Geophysical 12 months. In accordance with the Planetarium Projector and Science Museum, fewer than 50 items have been made, and so they offered for about $6,000 (about $62,000 in the present day). Musser created the extra inexpensive desktop model proven at high for the Seattle World’s Truthful. It stood about 60 centimeters tall, in regards to the measurement of a TV. (To see the desktop orrery in motion, take a look at the 2 movies on the backside of this listing 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 lecture rooms and museums.
I first stumbled throughout Musser’s desktop orrery, referred to as the Copernican Planetarium Mannequin 500, throughout a go to to the Whipple Museum of the History of Science, on the College of Cambridge. I already knew a bit about orreries, and I figured it might be straightforward 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 hundreds of outcomes, however nearly nothing about his engineering work. The truth is, after weeks of researching, I nonetheless know little greater than the three unreferenced traces on the finish of his Wikipedia page. In some unspecified time in the future within the Fifties, he left a instructing place at Northwestern College, moved to Southern California, and commenced working for Hughes Plane and possibly NASA as effectively. In accordance with 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 might 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 hundreds 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 just like a xylophone, however with a decrease vary and a hotter, deeper timbre. Once I contacted a good friend on the College of South Carolina’s Faculty of Music and stated 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.
Not solely was Musser a tremendous performer and composer, he was additionally a designer of musical devices. He made improvements in grips, mallets, and strategies, 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 coated each the xylophone’s and the marimba’s registers. In 1929, he organized and directed a 25-piece, all-female marimba ensemble for Paramount Footage.
For most individuals, debuting an merchandise at a world’s truthful can 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 widespread 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 taking part in at Carnegie Corridor. This video captures a live performance in Paris:
![Cover of sheet music featuring a photo of a man and a vibraphone.](https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/cover-of-sheet-music-featuring-a-photo-of-a-man-and-a-vibraphone.jpg?id=45856821&width=980)
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 a tremendous performer and composer, he was additionally a designer of musical devices. He made improvements in grips, mallets, and strategies, 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 coated each the xylophone’s and the marimba’s registers. In 1929, he organized and directed a 25-piece, all-female marimba ensemble for Paramount Footage.
For most individuals, debuting an merchandise at a world’s truthful can 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 widespread 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 taking part in 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 hitch Hughes Plane. In accordance with the finding aid for the Clair Omar Musser Assortment on the Percussive Arts Society, he labored there for under about 5 years. It appears, although, he had a lifelong fascination with house.
Musser started amassing meteorites in 1936, and his pastime turned extensively recognized sufficient that he acquired them as items. In 1960, as an illustration, the Soviet Union offered him with a chunk of the Sikhote-Alin meteorite. Two years later, the Philippines’ Atomic Vitality Fee contributed a siderite, a nickel-iron meteorite.
After 4 many years of amassing, 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 all the way down to forge 30 bars of exact sizes and tones. These “meteoric tone bars” turned the premise for a rare 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 Center, in Indianapolis. Right here’s an illustration of the instrument’s ethereal sound:
In accordance with the museum’s research notes on this one-of-a-kind object, it was impressed by Halley’s Comet and Musser’s mixed pursuits in music and house. Musser would have been 8 years previous—an impressionable age—when Halley’s Comet got here into naked-eye view in 1910. It was the primary time the comet had visited for the reason that invention of pictures. And on 19 May 1910, Earth truly handed by way of 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 among the worst potential viewing circumstances. (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 undoubtedly adopted his personal eccentric orbit. However simply as celestial orbits are periodic, music for pitched percussion just like the marimba and the Celestaphone usually 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 continuing series 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.”
From Your Website Articles
Associated Articles Across the Net