M&D: orrery

[Doug Millison]

3. Weird Words: Orrery

A mechanical device to show the motions of the planets.

The 'orrery' was invented by George Graham about 1710; the first
example was constructed by the London instrument maker John
Rowley. It was a device of arms and balls and gears, run by
clockwork, that showed how the planets and their satellites moved
around the sun as time passed; the Earth typically took about ten
minutes to go round once, so it could hardly have been an
enthralling spectacle by the standards of today. We ought to call
it a 'graham', after its inventor, but John Rowley made a copy for
Charles Boyle, the fourth Earl of Orrery, and named it in his
honour. It's really a reference to a geographic area, since the
Boyles took their title from an ancient term for a part of County
Cork, Ireland. (Boyle was described later that century as "one of
the literary ornaments of the reign of Queen Anne"; he was a
relative of the more famous Robert Boyle, he of Boyle's law.) The
'orrery' became a popular amusement and teaching device; no
progressive educational establishment was without one. But not
everybody was enthralled by it; in 1833 the Astronomer Royal, John
Herschel, called it a "childish toy", and Charles Dickens wrote an
unflattering description of a public lecture that featured one in
_The Uncommercial Traveller_: "My memory presents a birthday when
Olympia and I were taken by an unfeeling relative - some cruel
uncle, or the like - to a slow torture called an Orrery ... It was
a venerable and a shabby Orrery, at least one thousand stars and
twenty-five comets behind the age. Nevertheless, it was awful".

from:
WORLD WIDE WORDS       ISSUE 159        Saturday 25 September 1999
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