Our story begins with the deep-rooted urge of man to simulate the world about him through the graphic and
plastic arts….
The design is a mathematical
tour-de-force in elegantly mapping the heavenly vault
on a sphere, a cone, a
cylinder, or on specially placed planes.
— Derek J. de Solla Price, “Automata and the Origins of Mechanism and Mechanistic
Philosophy,” Technology and Culture,
Winter 1964