ca. 250 BC: Several Roman poets - Cicero, Ovid and Pappus - report about a mechanical sphere brought to Rome after the capture of Syracusae in 212 BC. It is said that General Marcus Marcellus (268-208 BC), who conquered the city, had taken two mechanisms - one for himself and the other donated to a temple in Rome. The device imitated the motions of the sun and the moon as well as the five planets known at that time. This model may have been kept in motion by the flow of water. Most likely it is the brainchild of Archimedes (287-212 BC). In his vague description over a century later, Cicero (106-43 BC) tells of seeing it and claimed that it actually represented the periods of the moon and the apparent motion of the sun with such accuracy that it would, over a short period, show their eclipses. Since astronomy was a branch of mathematics in Archimedes' time, he undoubtedly considered this and his other astronomical inventions much more important than those which could be put to practical use. Pappus of Alexandria (ca. AD 340) stated that Archimedes had written a now lost manuscript on the construction of these mechanisms.

1330: The first mechanical clocks having a wheelwork emerged in the 13th century. They were often mounted in churches and monasteries. Richard of Wallingford (1292-1336), abbot and mathematician at the Abbey of St. Alban, built a very complex machine. It was a mechanical marvel and probably one of the most sophisticated clocks ever constructed. It showed three particular features that remain enigmatic to this day: the main 24-hour-wheel with a strike mechanism that drives everything else, a lunar eclipse mechanism, and a planetary gearing. As such, it could be used like a geared astrolabe. In his treatise "Tractatus Horologii Astronomici" (1327), Richard describes its operation. He worked on this clock more than ten years, but it was accomplished 20 years after his death by William of Walsham. It disappeared during the dissolution of the St. Albans Abbey in 1546.

1612: Galileo Galilei made five attempts to built a machine to reproduce the motions of the Jovian moons. Such a modification of an orrery is called Jovilabium, a combined term from the words for Jupiter and Astrolabe. Galileo's construction was made of cardboard and had no cogs. A version of brass was built after his death and is now in the Museo della Scienza (Museum of the History of Science) in Florence, Italy. Ole Roemer also built a Jovilabium in 1677, and utilised cogs for the first time. It had a crank handle, but the wrong sizes of the objects impeded a useful purpose. Another Jovilabium was developed by Giovanni Domenico Cassini in 1677. It had several disks instead of cogs and was rather a graphical auxillary to predict the positions of the moons as well as their eclipses. The positions were looked up in tables and small balls were shifted along the rings which represented the orbits.

1682: An ingenious mechanism for a first moving model of planets was conceived by the Dutch physicist Christiaan Huygens (1629-1695). He took the ratio of the orbital periods of two planets and applied the method of continued fractions. He got an approximation for the construction of the cog wheels. For example, the ratio of the periods of Saturn and Earth is given by 77.708.431 : 2.640.858. The expansion of the continued fraction yields an approximation of 206:7. Thus, if the cogwheels of Saturn and the Earth had 206 and 7 cogs, respectively, then their modelled times would stay as commensurable as possible. A deviation only occurred after 1346 revolutions of the Earth. This was the first properly functioning miniature planetarium.

1712: The English clockmaker George Graham (1673-1751) produced two models of the Earth-moon system in the year 1704. It was a construction of arms and balls and gears, run by a precise clockwork. The moon revolved around the Earth, while the Earth spinned around its own axis, and both encircled outwards the sun. The Earth typically took about ten minutes to go round once. Graham gave his first model to the instrument maker John Rowley (1665-1728) in Ireland, to make a copy for Charles Boyle, 4th Earl of Orrery. The latter had a large collection of such toys. His passion was subject to an article in a local newspaper, so, these mechanical systems of the solar system were named after the Earl and became widely known as "Orreries".

1774: The largest orrery still in use was built the Dutch Eise Eisinga (1744-1828) into the ceiling of his living room in Franeker. The gearing mechanism is driven by several pendulums and weights that steer an impressive wheel work hidden behind a wall. The wheels are made of wooden tyres and disks, and the cogs are actually nails. The planets run in visible circular rails. Their periods around the sun correspond to the real times, i.e. Saturn needs 29.5 years for a complete turn. Thus, the momentary positions can be read off at any time. The planetary orbits are divided in accord to the zodiac showing their positions within the constellation figures in the sky.

1912: The Atwood Globe is the first modern reproduction of the starry sky with movable planets. This hollow sphere of 4.57 meters in diameter was built by the geographer Wallace Walter Atwood (1872-1949). 692 fine holes of various sizes in the metal surface represent stars down to the fourth magnitude. The outside illumination serves for the impression of the sky. A moveable light bulb simulates the sun, and apertures along the ecliptic, which can be uncovered as necessary, represent the planets. The moon phases are reproduced by two disks covering each other. Two electrically geared coastings turned the sphere along the equator once every 8 minutes. The Southern polar circle was cut in favour of an entry. The sphere can be inclined to give access for fifteen persons to the interior platform. It is located at the Museum of the Adler Planetarium in Chicago.