Word: planetaria
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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Star gazers in Germany have sat comfortably back in their planetaria (TIME, Feb. 13) and watched the earth move round the sun, the solar system gyrate. A lecturer has stood beside a colossal intricate mechanism, a steel cylindrical apparatus about 25 feet long with a great steel sphere at each end, bulbous with electric eyes. These were the stars and planets; each with its own motor to send it through any. desired orbit. Upon the huge domed ceiling, 75 feet across, the professor could project the sky as it looked to three shepherds of Judea on a certain cold night...
Youthful Germans will learn astronomy from planetaria installed in eleven cities. Craning their necks from seats in the very centre of these imitation universes, they will watch their professors speed up eternity, compel sun, moon and stars to step lively, giving their classes in a few minutes demonstrations of changes that take hundreds of centuries. The gyroscopic motion of the earth (26,000 years) will be reduced to four minutes. The earth's swing around the sun (one year) will be crowded into 7.3 seconds or slowed down to seven minutes to make it easier...
...fashioned planetaria, plentiful in Europe, are fitted with complcated machinery to put labeled spheres through miniature sets of the space-time paces of the solar system...