One of the city’s great museum attractions from an earlier era, the Atwood Celestial Sphere, will be given a new permanent home Tuesday afternoon when the 15-foot steel globe is lowered into the Adler Planetarium’s $40 million addition now under construction.
Designed and built in 1913 by Wallace Atwood, the director of the Chicago Academy of Sciences, the Atwood Sphere was a technological marvel of its time. In the first years after the sphere’s opening, long lines snaked through the academy’s museum at Clark Street and Armitage Avenue all day long as visitors waited to climb inside the contraption 12 at a time for a lesson in astronomy.
Once inside, visitors sat in chairs and looked overhead at an exact re-creation of the night sky over Chicago. It was re-created with external light shining through 692 holes punched through the sphere’s 1/64-inch thick galvanized steel skin. Each hole was sized and placed meticulously to represent the most visible stars and constellations.
The whole globe rotated around the audience inside by an electric motor while a lecturer explained the movement of the stars from dusk to dawn.
“It really was an ingenious and effective teaching tool,” said Marvin Bolt, an assistant curator of the history of astronomy at the Adler. “It still is. There are some really interesting things we will be able to do with it once the new exhibit opens.”
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Most people at the turn of this century learned star, planet and constellation positions and movements by looking at flat maps and small celestial globes depicting the heavens, Bolt said.
“That’s the God’s-eye view, as though you are standing outside looking down on the Milky Way,” he said. “With the Atwood, you look up as though you are at the center of the stars looking outward, viewing the sky as people actually see it at night.”
For 17 years, the Atwood Sphere was absolutely the best show in town–and probably the nation–for those interested in astronomy.
But in 1930, philanthropist Max Adler, who made his millions as an executive and early stockholder in Sears, Roebuck and Co., sponsored construction, on the city’s lakefront, of the first planetarium in the western hemisphere.
At the core of the new installation was a complex optical projector, built by the Carl Zeiss Co. in Jena, Germany, that created the illusion of a huge night sky on the interior of a vast, domed ceiling.
The Atwood could show the stars only from a Chicago perspective to a dozen people at a time. The Adler Planetarium’s Sky Show, with far more sophisticated and flexible technology, could (and still does) show an audience of hundreds the sky from any perspective in the world.
Almost overnight the Atwood’s popularity went into near-total eclipse. Few academy visitors paid much attention to it in the next 65 years, except when it was used to train principles of navigation to aviation cadets from Northwestern University during World War II.
The Academy of Sciences moved out of its old museum building in 1995 and is awaiting the construction of its new Nature Museum now going up at Cannon Drive and Fullerton Parkway in Lincoln Park. At the time of the move, the academy donated the Atwood to the Adler Planetarium.
Conservators had to cut the 500-pound globe into six pieces to remove it. They have since restored it, scraping its exterior of painted continents and oceans that the academy had added to the globe in the 1950s.
While it will continue its life as a working planetarium, the Atwood also fits very well as a historical artifact in the Adler’s already impressive collection of astronomical artifacts. The Adler’s early celestial mapping and navigational instruments and antique telescopes easily make up the best such collection in the western hemisphere, said Bruce Stephenson, the Adler’s history curator.
“It is a pretty nifty object,” Stephenson said. “It makes a perfect transition for our artifacts from the earliest days of astronomy into the 20th Century technology.”
In the new planetarium addition, which will ring the eastern, lakefront side of the original building’s facade like a crescent moon, the Atwood will sit near the first generation of the 21st Century planetarium technology–a 200-seat Star Rider Theater.
The Star Rider, a virtual reality computer-image planetarium that will take visitors on a 3-D ride through the heavens, swoop down to the surface of planets and fly like a comet past the sun and distant stars.
“We will have three operating planetariums from three different eras,” said Bolt, “the Atwood, the Zeiss and the Star Rider. I don’t think you’ll be able to see that anywhere else.”