The
history of the Johannesburg Planetarium begins
in the year 1956, when the Festival Committee,
instituted to organise the celebrations in that
year of the seventieth anniversary of the founding
of the city, decided that it would be a most
fitting way to mark the occasion to raise the
funds needed to buy and house a Zeiss Planetarium. Since
timing was a matter of importance, and since
it was soon found that it would not be possible
to obtain a new instrument within a period of
less than a year, it was decided to try and buy
one of the existing instruments in Europe.
With the assistance of the manufactures, and after
prolonged negotiation, the Festival committee succeeded
in inducing the City Council of Hamburg to sell
the instrument which had been in use in that city
since 1930, under conditions that the projector
would be fully modernised in the Zeiss factory
at Oberkochen, and that a new instrument would
in due course be build for Hamburg.
The Hamburg projector was therefore immediately
dismantled and moved to Oberkochen for complete
overhaul and, in time, was completely rebuilt,
while all the additional apparatus and improvements
developed since it was originally built were
added. The result was an instrument as
modern and complete as any in the world.
In the meantime, however, the responsibilities
of the Festival Committee had been taken over
by the Johannesburg City Council who, after further
negotiations, finally sold the projector to the
University of the Witwatersrand for use in the
formal instruction of students and as a public
amenity for the citizens of Johannesburg and
of South Africa in general. Plans for the
building were drawn in 1958, and building commenced
in 1959.
Finally the stage had now been reached when the
instrument had been installed and adjusted by a
team of Zeiss technicians, and the building was
on the point of final completion. On 12 October
1960 the first full-sized planetarium in Africa,
and the second in the Southern Hemisphere, opened
its doors to the public. |
