“I wish I knew more!” In keeping with this motto, Landgrave William IV of Hessia-Kassel had an observatory built in 1560 which soon became the leading one of its time. In awe of Copernicus’s latest findings, William had the position of the stars newly calculated.
In much the same vein, newly designed, mechanized celestial globes, featuring a mechanically driven solar pointer and a calendar ring in the horizontal plane, were being produced in Kassel. These globes, produced by Jost Bürgi, the royal clockmaker, could reveal when and where particular stars could be seen.
William V sent such globes to the Austrian emperor and other rulers as a sign that the advances in science should by no means bypass the royal court.
The replica in the exhibition does not even come close to Bürgis’s original. It stems from the hand of Johann Hügin of Lörrach, who, 450 years later, was so impressed by Bürgi’s celestial globe that he built a reproduction of it using his own modest means.
Celestial globe with clock movement, Johann Hügin, Lörrach, c. 1980, Inv. 2006-64