Rare 1926 Planetary Machine at Porto Alegre School Museum Is Only Functioning Model in Brazil

In Porto Alegre, within the walls of a Jesuit school, a mechanical model of the solar system has kept turning for a century — one of only five such instruments known to exist in the world, and the only one still in motion. Built in Paris in the era of Émile Bertaux and acquired by the Museu Anchieta de Ciências Naturais in 1926, the planetarium endures as a rare confluence of craft, science, and institutional devotion. Its survival asks something of us: that we consider what it means to preserve not just objects, but the particular ways human beings once reached toward understanding the cosmos