When last we left the good folks of Methods & Materials, a Chicago-based moving company specializing in the kinds of jobs sensible people avoid, they had just airlifted 17 perfectly enormous (some said, “fat”) bronze statues by sculptor Fernando Botero to pedestals in Grant Park for an exhibition last summer.
It was impressive feat, but now they’ve gone one further: They’re moving the universe.
Actually, they’re moving the “Atwood Celestial Sphere,” an antique planetarium that has been in orbit at the Academy of Sciences since 1913.
The Academy, which is building a new museum facility, recently moved out and the old building is being rehabbed as offices for the Lincoln Park Zoo.
Most of the Academy’s eclectic collection of stuff was relatively easy to pack away in boxes for storage, but a giant sphere, about 47 feet in circumference, presented a rather cosmic dilemma: It wouldn’t fit through the door, yet it was simply too precious to leave behind.
They just don’t make celestial spheres like they used to. Indeed, they never made very many celestial spheres at all, which is one of the reasons why Phyllis Pitluga, senior astronomer at the Adler Planetarium, was so intrigued by this one.
Unlike present-day planetariums where stars are projected onto a dome in an auditorium, one literally sits inside a celestial sphere. Stars are holes poked in the “sky” through which light filters. About a dozen people at a time can fit in the Atwood Sphere, which sports a “cityscape” silhouette at the horizon line and
whose perspective of the heavens is “as seen from Chicago.”
When Pitluga heard that the Academy of Sciences had decided not to take the sphere, she moved into action. The Adler was building an addition for a new digital planetarium–why not include the granddaddy of all planetariums as an exhibition, too?
Which leads us back to the original problem: How does one get a 47-foot sphere out the door?
Apparently, the same way it came in–in pieces. The planetarium was built on site with an external support system, but–because no one ever expected to move it–virtually no internal structural integrity. It’s a thin-skinned celestial sphere, only 1-64th of an inch thick, made of galvanized sheet steel.
“It’s like a beach ball, hollow on the inside,” explains Dean Langworthy, Lord High Carpenter of the M&M gang. “How do you cut up a beach ball so you can put it back together?”
Roger Machin, M&M’s founder, whips out a plastic baseball to illustrate. First he slices it into thirds horizontally, then the thirds are cut in half. That looks easy enough.
“Of course, you’ve got to construct an elaborate wooden framework inside the ball/sphere so it won’t collapse when you cut it.”
Once the celestial sphere is cut into bite-sized, doorway-friendly chunks, it will be stored for a couple of years until its home in the Adler’s new wing is ready. Then Roger, Dean and the crew will have to put the whole thing back together again–a sort of reverse “Big Bang.”
How does one top moving the universe? What could possibly be the next challenge for these rigging and packing Houdinis?
The crew often daydreams about “the ultimate job.” So if, one day, the Statue of Liberty seems to have wandered from her perch, or the Great Pyramids have been reduced to a series of giant building blocks in the dessert, or the faces on Mt. Rushmore have reversed order, you might just want to try looking under “M” in the phone book.
