Theaters of Time and Space: American Planetaria, 1930–1970 , Jordan D. Marché II , Rutgers U. Press, New Brunswick, NJ, 2005. $49.95 (266 pp.). ISBN 0-8135-3576-X
We do not usually associate James Dean with science education, but as Jordan D. Marché II reminds us in his scholarly account, Theaters of Time and Space: American Planetaria, 1930–1970, the opening scenes of Rebel Without a Cause were filmed at the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles. In the film, the planetarium lecturer follows up a portrayal of the Big Bang with a speech about the smallness of human beings in the chilling immensity of the universe. By 1955, when the movie was released, the planetarium had become a common feature of American life, and Theaters of Time and Space is primarily concerned with why that was so. The book also examines the boom in planetarium building that followed on the heels of Sputnik I in 1957 as American lawmakers scrambled to plug what they saw as alarming gaps in the US educational system.
Marché, a lecturer in astronomy at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and a planetarium specialist, opens his book with an account of mechanical models of the universe. He moves on quickly to the story of the projection planetarium, in which Oskar von Miller played a key role. Miller was the director of the Deutsches Museum in Munich, Germany, at the turn of the 20th century and initially wanted to secure mechanical models for the museum. But during a meeting in 1914 between Miller and representatives of the Carl Zeiss Optical Co, Walther Bauersfeld and Werner Straubel hit upon the chief ideas of the projection planetarium. In 1923, the first public demonstrations were given at the Deutsches Museum.
Such was the popularity of these new devices that by 1930 engineers had constructed 15 planetaria in Europe. In that year, with the aid of a hefty donation from the vice president of Sears, Roebuck and Co, the Adler Planetarium opened in Chicago. In the following decade, Zeiss projectors were housed in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania, in Los Angeles, and in New York City. Two smaller, non-Zeiss planetaria were located in San Jose, California, and Springfield, Massachusetts.
Zeiss projectors were relatively expensive at this period. It was the dream of American entrepreneur, educator, and astronomy enthusiast Armand N. Spitz to make planetarium projectors widely available around the world. Although he was not the first to conceive of or manufacture the so-called pinhole projector, Spitz successfully brought it to a broad audience after World War II. By 1945, he had built his model-A projector at his home; it projected about 1000 stars whose brightness extended down to the fourth magnitude. Eight years later, he had sold his 100th projector worldwide.
Although Spitz projectors fueled an increase in planetarium building, it was Sputnik I and Sputnik II that greatly expanded the market for his machines. The launch of those Soviet satellites prompted lawmakers to pour money into science education in unprecedented amounts. The planetarium, as Marché argues, acquired a novel and major significance in the US, and hundreds were built for schools and colleges. Planetaria were also put to new use in the 1960s—for example, as training aids for the Apollo astronauts.
But Marché does not focus on just the hardware and its builders. He also explores in detail the kinds of presentations visitors could experience in planetaria and the reasons for the shifts in their content over the years. A particularly interesting development was the first planetarium light show. As Marché recounts, the light shows grew out of a series of sound experiments in the late 1950s by composer Henry Jacobs and filmmaker Jordan Belson in San Francisco’s Morrison Planetarium. The Vortex performances, as they were termed, soon became very controversial and sparked debate about the appropriate and inappropriate uses of planetaria. Marché also traces the establishment of a community of planetarium operators, lecturers, and managers and their attempts to develop professional standards and journals. He pays attention to the composition and nature of the workforce; in so doing, he demonstrates the field’s depressing extent of discrimination against women, particularly in the 1930s and 1940s.
Although the prose in Theaters of Time and Space occasionally reflects the book’s origins as a doctoral thesis, the author’s arguments are clear and flow from a great deal of careful research that includes an impressive use of archives. Marché has written an original and significant study that sets the development of planetaria in a broad context. His book deserves a wide readership beyond planetarium specialists.
