The Press: Lack

The U. S. has beauty shows, rodeos, aquariums, stockyards. It has football stadia, fisticuffing gardens, chambers of horror, mad-houses. Also zoos, museums, 5-&-10-cent stores, a diamond horseshoe, divorce courts, a Congress and other exhibits. But, according to Dr. G. Clyde Fisher, of the American Museum of Natural History, one thing the U. S. has not got for its people to go and look at is a working model of the free and boundless heavens. . . . Last week Dr. Fisher, who is an astronomer, told Manhattan illuminating engineers that the American Museum would soon start raising three millions for a projection planetarium, a dome 75 feet in diameter atop a five-story building designed as an astronomical centre for scholars, amateurs, sightseers of the whole country. Searchlights, meticulously aimed and synchronized, will cast into a night-blue field with a perfect illusion of limitless space, bright images of the moon, the sun, the planets, stars and Milky Way. In 26 minutes instead of 26,000 years the incredulous may behold a complete succession of the equinoxes.*

*Old-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.