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An orrery is a mechanical model of the solar system, demonstrating the motions of the planets and their satellites around the sun. Orreries were regarded as essential teaching equipment for 18th-century lectures on “natural philosophy” (the physical sciences). Such apparatus became popular from around 1700, when John Rowley built one for patron the Charles Boyle, the fourth Earl of Orrery in Ireland.

In 1767, David Rittenhouse, a Pennsylvania clockmaker and self-taught astronomer designed and built a teaching orrery for the College of Philadelphia (now University of Pennsylvania) but before it was completed, John Witherspoon, president of the College f New Jersey (renamed Princeton in 1896), purchased it from Rittenhouse for £220 ($8500 today) and installed it in Nassau Hall.  The decision was roundly criticized by intellectuals in Philadelphia, who argued that the breathtaking scientific instrument ought not to be sent to a “mere village like Princton.” Rittenhouse later made amends, building a second orrery on the same model and giving it to the University of Pennsylvania.

Completed the following year, the Rittenhouse orrery was like no other, it was four-foot square with a face made of painted sheet-brass and fitted with two large dials. The first dial demonstrates the motion of Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, each with their known satellites. The second dial, interlocked with the first can be set to specific hours, days, months, and years. Rittenhouse’s machine could be adjusted to show the positions of the planetary bodies at any given moment down to the hour in a 5,000-year period.  This Rittenhouse Orrery has been preserved at the University of Pennsylvania Library. 

In his Notes on Virginia (1781), Thomas Jefferson used Rittenhouse’s creation to contradict the claim by Comte de Buffon (Georges Louis Leclerc the preeminent scholar of natural sciences to the court of Louis XVI) who argued that nature, plant life, animal life, and human life degenerate in the New World in contrast with their state in the Old World. “We have supposed Mr. Rittenhouse second to no astronomer living: that in genius he must be the first, because he is self-taught.” Jefferson’s praise focused on the orrery: “As an artist he has exhibited as great a proof of mechanical genius as the world has ever produced. He has not indeed made a world; but he has by imitation approached nearer its Maker than any man who has lived from the creation to this day.”

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