Jost Bürgi, a native of Lichtensteig in the Toggenburg, Switzerland, was born in the year 1552 and died in Cassel in the year 1632.[365] Early in life he became a clock maker’s apprentice, and for some time was engaged with Dasypodius in the construction of the famous Strassburg Cathedral clock. In the year 1579 he was called to the court of Landgrave William IV in Cassel, under whose patronage he won great distinction as a maker of astronomical and mathematical instruments. In the year 1603 he was called into the service of the Emperor at Prague, but in the year 1631 he returned to Cassel, where he died in the following year. Bürgi, skilful workman that he was, seems not to have found time to tell in words of his various activities. “He found pleasure in work,” says one of his biographers, and left it for others to write of his attainments, which, it may here be said, they seem not to have done in a very detailed manner. Landgrave William’s interest in the promotion of scientific studies led him to the founding of a museum to which he made numerous contributions of apparatus, mathematical and astronomical. This museum, in the course of years, became one of the most famous of its kind in all Europe, and indeed remains such to this day. In its collections the work of Bürgi is well represented, which in the quality of the workmanship exhibited, as in the interest it awakens by reason of its place as a nucleus around which so much of value has been gathered, is unsurpassed. Among the first of his instruments may be mentioned an astronomical clock, elaborately wrought, with movable discs and circles for illustrating the movements of the heavenly bodies, and surmounted with an engraved celestial globe, which, driven by clockwork, is made to turn on its axis once in twenty-four hours. It seems evident that Bürgi constructed other clocks of like character, supplied, as is this example, with a celestial globe. In this same Museum of Cassel there is a second celestial globe, the work of Bürgi, which was begun in the year 1585, and not entirely completed until the year 1693 by Heinrich van Lannep. This copper sphere, 72 cm. in diameter, is remarkably well preserved. It has a heavy brass meridian circle to which is attached an engraved hour circle 46 cm. in diameter. A large brass semicircle intersects this meridian circle at right angles through the north pole, and is attached to the horizon circle at its extremities. The instrument rests upon an artistic and substantial brass support. On the surface of the sphere are engraved the principal celestial circles, including the colures, the equator, the tropics, the polar circles, the ecliptic, and twelve parallels. The stars, of which the largest are distinguished by a bit of inlaid silver, and the several figures of the constellations which are very artistically engraved, are clearly the work of a master.