1913: The history of the modern projection planetarium started with Oskar von Miller (1855-1934), the founder of the Deutsches Museum in Munich, searching for an attraction for its astronomical section. He turned to the astronomer Max Wolf (1863-1932) in Heidelberg who suggested a public show that demonstrated the motions in the sky. Originally, Wolf thought of a rotating sphere of stars with the visitor in the centre while the happenings occurred in time lapse. The antetype was the Atwood Globe presented just in the previous year. Miller approached the Carl Zeiss Company in Jena with this thought.

At that time, Walther Bauersfeld (1879-1959) was the chief engineer at Zeiss. He was working on shell constructions for large, free-standing domes. He designed the first "geodesic dome", an almost spherical structure of triangular elements that form in their entity a spherical shell. Bauersfeld caught the idea of the rotating sphere and worked on a solution. The work was delayed by the beginning of the World War I, though. From 1919 to 1923 he invented and developed the first planetarium. The masterpiece was the electronically driven star projector. Other inventions are related to precision engineering and optics. In 1928, he became adjunct professor for astronomy.