Past Forward: A Planetarium is Born

In 1912, Oskar von Miller, an electrical engineer and the founder of the Deutsches Museum, had an idea: Could you project an artificial starry sky onto a dome, as a way of demonstrating astronomical principles to the public? It was such a novel concept that when von Miller asked executives at the Carl Zeiss company to manufacture the projector, they initially turned him down. Lead engineer Walther Bauersfeld made it happen. Completed in 1923, the Zeiss Model I displayed 4,500 stars, the Milky Way, and five planets across a 10-meter dome built on the roof of the Zeiss headquarters in Jena. The planetarium was the first of its kind, defining the look and feel of these installations to this day.