Use at Middlebury and Implications

     This orrery most likely was used in Enfield’s Natural Philosophy and Astronomy, a junior course at the time. An orrery is the perfect tool to have while teaching this course during the early 1800’s, especially during this time it was very hard to visualize something such as the orbits and relationships of the planets in our solar system due to the incredibly vast size, timely orbits and our inability to actually see it in its entirety. Now with computers and more advanced technology we can easily develop three dimensional digital models to demonstrate and analyze the solar system in hundreds of different ways. But at the time this orrery was created it the best and most advanced tool available, it would have allowed the professor to show his students this planetary motion with a physical representation instead of drawings. In addition, it also would have opened up new course material that he could teach such as how to predict the positions and relationships between the planets.

     We can draw significant connections between this orrery and the air pump that Hall brought to America around the same time that he did the orrery. The air pump allowed Hall to demonstrate the complex properties of air and vacuums that people could not visualize without the pump. Very similar to the use of the orrery that allows people to observe the motion and relationship between celestial bodies, the air pump allows students to learn about and perceive air. These are both things that we now know exist but we are not able to totally conceptualize their properties without the right tools. These two tools allow us to view something that was nearly impossible to perceive before. Air was previously not believed to have any mass or physical properties. It is something that is easy to forget is there but using the air pump you can see in detail the complexity of the invisible air around you; it has mass, density and the pump shows how there can be space without air, a vacuum. Very similar to air, planets are just outside of our comprehensible reach from our typical viewpoint. We can see the planets in the sky if know where and when to look, but from our position on earth we cannot visualize their positions and motion in relation to each other and the sun. Since the planets are only visible occasionally even if you are intentionally looking for one, they too just like air can easily be forgotten or ignored for one’s entire life without consequence. But, the orrery enables the user to expand their view of the world to include the planetary system around us, seeing the intricacy of the solar system and how it works. Both tools use fairly simple concepts to uniquely open up the user to another ‘dimension’ of thought to the world around them.