The Curious Case of the Rittenhouse Orrery: Power, Progress, and Providence in the Age of Enlightenment

by: Thomas Apel In 1948, in the basement of McCosh Hall at Princeton University, carpenters discovered a dusty old shipping crate containing a curious and largely forgotten machine. Unsure of what it was, much less how it worked, the university took the tangled mass of gears, shafts, and springs to astronomy professor Newton Pierce. Recognizing the object, Pierce declared that it was the…