"A Touch of Aristotle, A Dash of Barnum"

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."

In San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, the Academy of Sciences has a larger-than-life rattlesnake jaw with fangs, which snaps shut at the push of a button, and an instant earthquake showing the heaving innards of the earth. Oregon's imaginative Museum of Science and Industry in Portland offers a "micro-zoo" that, by magnifying a drop of water 200 times, reveals the teeming life in it. "We want to make a simple scientific statement the student will understand," says Executive Director Loren McKinley. "We don't go in for pinball exhibits."

The Los Angeles museum glitters with flashing lights, which help attract 10,000 Southern California students each month to learn by personal discovery. When the visitor puts his finger on a generator and pushes a button, he transmits the electricity stored up in his body to a neon tube, which then glows. At an ingenious IBM exhibit called Mathematica, designed by Charles and Ray Eames, bulbs light up to demonstrate what happens when a number is squared or cubed. After a tour through a giant animated atom, students can test their newly acquired knowledge on a teaching machine.

"Scram" & Sonar. The Atomic Energy Commission's Atomsville is the highlight of New York's still-aborning museum. Parents are not allowed inside Atomsville, but through television they can watch children simulate bending a beam of electrons, handle "radio active" material with mechanical hands, and run a mock reactor that will shut off when it reaches the "scram" level --just as it does at Oak Ridge.

Two of the oldest museums are among the best. The Science Museum of Philadelphia's Franklin Institute boasts 425 audience-participation devices ranging from a simple prism that refracts light rays to a 350-ton Baldwin locomotive that moves up and down a track. Boston's "science smorgasbord," as Director Henry Bradford Washburn calls it, includes a bucket pendulum that dribbles sand in harmonic patterns, a working cloud chamber, and a reproduction of a ship's bridge equipped with radar, sonar, gyroscopes, steering mechanism and a view of the Charles River.

Holding Down Advertising. Science and industry exhibits are necessarily a collaboration between museums and private industry. Some smaller museums sometimes have to accept a big dose of advertising along with exhibits of doubtful scholarship. By contrast, Chicago's booming Museum of Science and Industry can invite companies to supply elaborate displays that meet its main educational requirement, which is to trace the sequence of an industrial development from the basic scientific discovery to its future applications. Even though they get credit only in modest plaques, firms are eager to respond; the museum's 14 acres of floor space house $25 million worth of exhibits paid for by 50 major U.S. corporations. Last week Moscow announced that its first show in the U.S. of Soviet space exploits will be put on in Chicago next year.

In tribute to his museum's visitors, Lohr says that the most popular exhibits are those that require the use of brains or muscles, thus reinforcing new knowledge. In tribute to the museum's own popularity, the Chicago Police Dept. stations an officer there to be on the lookout for students who would rather get an education at the museum than by going to school.

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