When Lenox Riley Lohr resigned as president of NBC to take charge of Chicago's faltering Museum of Science and Industry in 1940, outraged scientists warned that showmanship would trample scholarship. "A tragedy has occurred in the cultural life of our city," mourned the University of Chicago's Nobel-prizewinning physicist, Arthur Holly Compton.
It is true that Lohr, an elfin man who at 73 still runs the museum, shamelessly believes in the old showman's rule of "Ya gotta get 'em in the tent." Every exhibit clamors for the attention of the passing public—and then goes on to hammer real knowledge into the heads of people ranging in age, as Lohr puts it, "from two to toothless." The museum, which just received its 50 millionth visitor, is probably the world's biggest institution of informal, nonobligatory mass scientific education.
See the Noise? The Chicago museum, on the lakefront near the University of Chicago, was born to keep up with technology: the original building was part of the Columbian Exposition of 1893. For a while afterward it was the home of the Field Museum of Natural History. Reconstruction began in 1926, after Merchant Philanthropist Julius Rosenwald returned from a visit to Munich's famed Deutsches Museum, which pioneered in developing industrial exhibits the visitor could operate. He and his eight-year-old son William, were fascinated. Rosenwald gave the equivalent of $8,000,000 in Sears, Roebuck stock, and by the time of the 1933 Century of Progress fair, the Museum of Science and Industry was a reality.
Now, amidst the casual atmosphere of a subdued county fair, a visitor can "see" his voice, watch a working model steel mill, scramble through a captured German submarine, ride an elevator down to an operating coal mine under the museum, watch thousands of plastic balls fall into a probability curve, follow a feather and a penny as they fall at the same rate in a vacuum. Everywhere, the visitor participates, pushing buttons, pulling levers, yanking chains, turning cranks and talking into phones. He can play ticktacktoe with a computer, watch baby chicks hatch, walk through a throbbing, 16-ft. model of the human heart, see a display that illustrates "everything to do with sex."
And almost every pause drives home some fact that a textbook might take pages explaining. The visitor sees that two balls, one dropped vertically and the other simultaneously fired horizontally, hit the ground together. "It takes but a few seconds, but the conviction is absolute and the memory is retained," says Lohr. Chicago now outdraws the Deutsches Museum by five to one.
Instant Earthquake. Chicago's museum is being copied by Tokyo, Montreal, Cairo, Madrid and Tel Aviv. In the technologically-minded U.S., science and industry museums have sprouted in 17 major cities. New York is belatedly trying to catch up by building a permanent Hall of Science, now partly open, at the World's Fair. In all of them the principle, as Don M. Muchmore, former director of the California Museum of Science and Industry in Los Angeles, puts it, is: "A touch of Aristotle and a dash of Barnum."