Word: planetarium
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...first day at school, Jim's class pays a visit to a planetarium, which the gang decides to make the scene for a little action. Buzzy, stereotyped black-jacketed levi leader of the mob, goads Jim into a switchblade duel. (Stark has a paranoic aversion to being called "chicken") But merely proving himself in this daytime version of kicks is not enough; society demands more...
...scene: San Francisco's Morrison Planetarium. The occasion: an evening of Vortex, a "new form of theater based on electronics, optics and architecture," which in the last year and a half has put thousands of San Franciscans in a spin...
...machine that has the effect, at 15 flashes per second, of inducing the shakes in some viewers (Belson keeps his flicker to a safe eight flashes per second). Jacobs controls the sound from a console that is hooked into twelve three-story loudspeakers located about the rim of the planetarium, plus four bass speakers around the room. By turning a crank he can produce rings of sound racing smoothly about the dome's circumference. He can also make his sound tinkle and drip from side to side or leap in front of or behind an audience. Jacobs either uses...
Peerless on Earth. For the opera house, Old Master Wright designed "a glorification of acoustics, making of it a poetic circumstance." A mighty crescent rises out of lagoons to the apex of the combined opera house and civic auditorium. Beneath the auditorium is a planetarium; on top, a crenelated cupola housing "Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp." Close by, soars a towering TV antenna in the form of Mohammed's sword. For his more mundane second commission, a central post office building, Wright sunk the main floor 11 ft. into the earth to get away from the heat, screened...
Last week, with post-Sputnik hindsight, Director I. M. Levitt of Philadelphia's Fels Planetarium called that 1955 decision an "astonishing piece of stupidity." Levitt's argument, echoed by Army missilemen: the Army's Jupiter intermediate ballistic missile, well along in 1955, could and should have been adapted for launching a satellite (a modified Jupiter has reached an altitude of 650 miles, higher than Sputnik's orbit). But when it was made, the National Security Council decision seemed sensible enough. The U.S. had committed itself to pass on to the rest of the world, including Russia...