Good deal. How about Tuesday? They open at 9:30 a.m. I’ll try to call the museum PR office on Monday. Things have been remodeled and stuff has been moved around; need to figure out what’s been relocated and what’s just gone. You never know, maybe I can arrange for cuts in line for the coal mine. No promises.
Great! Email me with details, and I’ll be there.
Congrats, Karen – this is now the launch point for one of Cecil’s STRAIGHT DOPE CHICAGO columns: http://chicago.straightdope.com/sdc20100805.php
Good column. But when I saw the Giant Heart photo at the top, I got all excited that the article would tell me its fate. It was always my favorite exhibit, but on a recent visit to the MSI, I couldn’t find it anywhere. Alas, the article never mentioned it at all. What’s up, Cecil: was the heart there or not? Does the beat go on? Thanks!
This is a two-part column. Wait till next week.
Good stuff! Glad to see the MSI getting its due. Hope you had a chance to see the U-505.
Yay! The first time The Master has deigned to acknowledge my existence! This is going directly onto my resume!
Re the carbide lamp demo, my dim memory matches Cecil and Ed in that it was at the end of the coal mine tour. But the only time I went through it was in 1964.
Are Cecil and Ed sure about nim in the phones exhibit? The only nim I remember was on the other side of the museum, across the main hall. My memory says it was near a modern automobile exhibit.
Here’s my memory of the layout of the nim game (colors may have been different). old nim game at the Museum of Science and Industry | Flickr
The circular panel in the middle of each square was lighted. There were 4 buttons, arranged vertically on the guard rail, color coded by row. You pressed a button once for each light you wanted to turn off. After you made your choice, the mechanism would buzz/beep once a second until it figured out its move.
The phones exhibit did have a tic-tac-toe game that IIRC originally used only mechanical phone switches. You rotary-dialed the digit of the square you wanted to mark.
I remember the passage, but not everything you mention.
Damn, you may be right. I remember a tic-tac-toe game, although I don’t recall having to use a rotary dial. And I believe there was a game in the General Motors exhibit - I think it was in the same general area as the strobe lamp that you could use to “stop” the rotating engine fan blades. Now that you mention it, this may have been the Nim game, which was as you describe. I may have gotten tic-tac-toe and Nim mixed up. Once again I have let down the Master.
Cool column! I’m looking forward to the next installment. I’ve been there a couple of times in the past 3 years with groups of high school kids. Reading the column, it feels like we missed a lot. I’ll be sharing this with the teacher who organizes these trips so that we organize the trip better next time…
The game I remember from the 70s was part of an exhibit that featured a bunch of CRT screens in a row. Each CRT was “controlled” by a large plastic dial had numbered hash marks, each number corresponded to a different slide for that screen. Some numbers were for tic-tac-toe, some for stories.
These were on the main floor back toward the Mine, to the right of the oil well game. At the entrance to the CRT chamber were four small chain-driven mechanical things on the wall, two on each side; visitors could turn a crank and make the mechanical things move. I think the Omnimax is in that location now.
Since we’re on the topic of the MSI, what was the name of that exhibit with the half-egg looking vehicles that ran on a fixed track and guided kids through some brainwashing of energy specifics? It was a pretty cool ride, and I’m pretty sure a good make-out hot spot for couples creating their own energy.
I always called it the petroleum ride. I’m not sure what the official name was. If I remember correctly, it prophesied we would be using much less oil by now, because we would be using shale, tar sands, solar power, nuclear energy and god knows what else much more by now. That ride had some awesome effects, completely done with models and lights, no computer graphics.
“…and coming full circle with the source of all energy…THE SUN!!!’” Cue to turn on huge model of the sun and burn out riders’ eyeballs.