SPRINGFIELD, MA (WGGB/WSHM) -- As the United States moves closer to its 250th birthday this year, a scientific treasure in Western Massachusetts continues to allow thousands of people to visit the stars without ever leaving the region.

The “star ball” inside the Springfield Science Museum debuted in 1937 and made the city home to one of the first planetariums in the country. The device is not only a technological marvel, but could easily be an exhibit in the very museum where it remains in operation.

Measuring nearly five feet across, with 41 silver rings surrounding a massive 500-watt bulb, the sci-fi looking device inside the Seymour Planetarium projects a stellar map. Its creation in the 1930s helped put Springfield on the map.

For such a relatively small city, the Korkosz Projector showed the scientific community Springfield could punch well above its weight. “In the early 1930s, when planetariums were popping up in huge cities, the first one ever in America was Chicago. We knew here in Springfield, at the beginning of the [Great] Depression, we could not afford a projector like that,” said Jenny Powers, director of science at Springfield Museums.

Planetarium projectors were made almost exclusively in Germany at the time, which meant big bucks. “Using an inflation calculator I’ve learned those projectors in today’s money would have cost about $3.2 million, so in the Depression, in Springfield, we had a museum technician who had just a wonderful background story and he decided that he could just build one,” Powers added.

That museum technician was Frank Korkosz, a young man who lived in Chicopee. From an early age, he had developed a love for the stars and a talent for building things related to space, though never something as complicated as a star projector.

“He’d never done this before, but what he had done before was he had made a projector after seeing Halley’s Comet. He’d made a projector out of shoe box, a lens, and a carbide light and he was charging the neighborhood kids a few cents to come in and see the show,” Powers explained.

It was the beginning of a lifelong passion for astronomy and a dream to one day build a device that would accurately portray the night sky.

That dream presented itself in the early 1930s when the museum added a new floor and a windowless space with a domed ceiling. Korkosz knew the ceiling would be perfect for a planetarium. In 1934, with the help of his brothers, he began to build his optomechanical planetarium projector.

The device was a far cry from that boyhood shoebox, with complex gears and lenses and sheets of metal hammered out and welded all by hand.

“It’s made of a series of canisters that have tin, round pieces of tin inside where Frank punched the holes for each star that the planetarium projector can project onto the sky,” Powers noted.

More than 7,000 stars in total were copied from pictures of the Springfield skyline taken from the roof of the museum where it is located.

The projector opened to the public in 1937 with a record of continuous operation now approaching nine decades. “We still use it. It’s a beauty. It’s a real treat and people come, especially astronomy enthusiasts and telescope makers know the value of those lenses and that construction and so people actually come from really far away just to see the star ball,” Powers said.

The device was made by a largely self-educated man who never graduated from college, but whose passion, creativity, precision, and ambition live on within the walls of the museum where he worked for the better part of his life.

The Korkosz brothers would go on to build their second and last projector in 1948 for the Museum of Science in Boston. “But unfortunately, the Boston Planetarium doesn’t love history quite as much as we do in Springfield. Their’s got scrapped,” Powers explained.

It was removed and replaced in 2011, leaving Springfield’s Korkosz star ball the only one in existence and the oldest American-made planetarium projector in the entire world.

“Obviously, it’s a treasure that we just can’t really say enough good things about. We love it. It’s the pride of the Springfield Science Museum. I would say it’s the pride of all the Springfield Museums. I would put its value close to that of the Monet in the art museum,” Powers said.

Frank Korkosz would eventually become director of the Springfield Science Museum, a position he held until his retirement in 1974.

Shows are available on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays at the Springfield Museums.

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