Swiss National Museum

This guide to the Swiss National Museum in Zurich follows Jost Bürgi, a self-taught watchmaker from eastern Switzerland who became court clockmaker at Hesse-Kassel in 1579 and built clocks so precise they lost less than a minute a day. Around 1588, wrestling with the tedious math behind star charts, he worked out logarithms, only to watch a Scottish mathematician publish the same idea first and take the credit. His friend the astronomer Johannes Kepler eventually pushed him to publish his own tables decades later. The guide centers on an object Bürgi built for the Holy Roman Emperor in 1594, a mechanized celestial globe whose brass gears still turn today.