Products of Padua
Some things take time, but a magazine ad more than 600 years in the making? That’s unusual, but it’s one way of looking at the ads for mG miniGears that featured a complex, highly geared, planet-tracking clock called the Astrarium.
The Addendum team had noticed the clock in miniGears’ ads in Gear Technology; the last one appeared in the Jan./Feb. ’04 issue, and the top of it is at right. But we only recently learned the story behind the clock, why the ads featured it, and how a man’s interest in the Astrarium led to the creation of two books and a CD about the ancient device.
The story starts with Giovanni Dondi, who lived in 14th-century Italy, in Padua. Although a doctor, Dondi was interested in astronomy and clockmaking, so much so he designed and built the original Astrarium in the 1360s. More than a regular clock, the Astrarium uses a year wheel and a geared assembly to track the movements of the sun, moon and five planets: Venus, Mercury, Saturn, Jupiter and Mars.
Dondi didn’t include the other three planets because he didn’t know about them. No one did. It’s the 14th century, after all; Uranus, Neptune and Pluto hadn’t been discovered yet.
Still, the Astrarium was a complicated device and needed 89 gears—including spurs, helicals, internals and ellipticals—to perform all its functions. Besides making it, Dondi wrote a manuscript, the Tractatus Astrarii, detailing how to build the clock; he left a way for the Astrarium to be brought out of the Middle Ages.
More than 600 years later, the Astrarium was brought out; it was re-created, built on commission in 1974. Two years later, an Italian engineer, Vincenzo de’ Stefani, founded mG miniGears SpA. Already a resident of Padua, he decided to locate his gear-manufacturing company there.
