was that some time later a launch with three local
officers churned up to the solitary island, and that gunshots echoed
in the gloom of a hushed laboratory room, and a man's white-faced body
was carried from the cabin where he had made his one great treacherous
effort to steal another's fame.
"JAZZING UP THE UNIVERSE"
Centuries of celestial history wheeled across the plaster sky of the
new Adler planetarium at Chicago, recently, at the dedication of the
astronomical institution, the first of its kind in the Western
Hemisphere.
A modern Joshua, working the levers and switches of a complicated
instrument, commanded a miniature sun to stand still in the
heavens--and it did. He bettered the feat of the Biblical prophet by
stopping the sun at any given point on its orbit across the skies, and
then ran it backward, its attendant planets, planetoids and stars
scampering contrary to all rules of the universe.
The Joshua in the person of Professor Philip Fox, director of the
planetarium on a "made" island in Lake Michigan described the
instrument with which he made the heavenly bodies cut capers, as a
projector, made in Germany at a cost of almost $100,000. As nearly as
it can be described by a layman it looks like three immense diving
helmets capping the ends of a tube about six feet long. Each "helmet"
is studded with lenses and inside are complicated and strange lights
and projectors which throw the images of the celestial bodies on the
white plaster dome above that represents the skies. The wheeling
motion of the universe toward the west is obtained by revolving the
"helmets" in eccentric circles on an axis. The whole effect makes a
spectator feel as if the solar system was revolving around him at a
greatly accentuated speed.
As a beginning lesson for the layman who attended the opening,
Professor Fox set the machine to represent the latitude of Chicago on
May 10, 1930. Every one turned his eyes to the east, where a
silhouette of Lake Michigan, with its lighthouses and ore ships, is
painted on the plaster horizon. The dome was lighted to represent a
clear night, and, incidentally, all nights are clear in a planetarium.
The machine was started and up from the center of the Lake jumped
Mars, red against the darkness.
Professor Fox, with a flashlight that throws the image of an arrow,
pointed out the stars as they appeared over the dome. The coming of
Mars forecast the dawn of May 10 and in a few moments the
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