Eise Eisinga Planetarium
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How it came to be
Eise Eisinga was born in 1744 at Dronryp in Friesland and worked in the wool trade in Franeker, teaching himself mathematics and astronomy. In 1774 he began building a moving model of the solar system into the ceiling of his living room. He expected to finish in six months; it took until 1781.
Around a painted Sun hang the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, driven in real time by a single pendulum clock. The scale is one millimetre to a million kilometres. Uranus was discovered in 1781, the year the model was finished, but there was no room left for it on the ceiling. Some 10,000 handmade nails went into the gearing, which sits with the clock in the space above the ceiling.
In 1818 King William I visited and bought the planetarium for the Dutch state, which gave it to the town of Franeker in 1859. The oldest orrery still working was inscribed in 2023.
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