I grew up in Milwaukee and a lot of kids either had visited Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry with their families or went there on a field trip. My wife who grew up in the Chicago metro area of course went there as a kid.
So yesterday we were meeting my son’s new teachers for middle school (Minneapolis) and my son mentioned to his new science teacher that he had visited the Museum of Science and Industry this past week. The science teacher had never heard of the place and asked where it was.
I thought it was strange that a science teacher of all people had never heard of the place. Is it not that well known or was this guy just not very well traveled?
To be fair, I’d have a hard time mentioning any museums outside Chicago aside from the Smithsonian and some internationally renown art museums. Is there a science museum in, say, New York? Probably, but hell if I know.
Edit: Does that Creationism museum in Kentucky count? 
My wife grew up in Chicago, and so I have heard of it, but until I met her, no I had never heard of it and I have never heard anyone other than her or her Chicago family mention it.
So I would say it is not well knowing outside of that general vicinity.
I think this is the gist of it. There are fairly few museums that’d have strong name recognition outside of their areas.
MSI is very well known in Chicago (and, yes, possibly, Milwaukee) because it’s local, and because many schoolkids visit it. Once you get much further away from Chicago than Milwaukee, I’d wager that the percentage of residents who’ve visited any Chicago museum drops pretty steeply.
And, the Twin Cities has their own, well-regarded Science Museum of Minnesota.
I been to it twice, so maybe I don’t count. I had Basic and A school training at Great Lakes.
NYC has many great and well known museums but not any especially famous science museums. There is the Liberty Science Center in Liberty State Park in NJ & the NY Hall of Science is in Brooklyn I believe. But NYC of course has the very famous American Museum of Natural History (Teddy’s Museum), The Guggenheim, The Museum of Modern Art and of course the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Central Park. Of course there are probably another 100 museums not so well known in the City also.
Baltimore has a nice Science Museum oriented towards kids in the inner harbor. San Diego has 15 smallish museum in Balboa park and one was a nice Science Museum.
I’ve been to the one in Virginia but I can’t even recall its name.
Then there is the Smithsonian of course.
I had field trips there twice. Neither made for fond memories, and not just cause I’d preferred Shedd Aquarium or the Natural History one. Southwest Michigan, BTW.
I’ve been to the Museum of Science and Industry–cool place! I especially liked the interactive Boeing 727 and the model railroad underneath it.
There’s more than one Museum of Science and Industry. Portland and Tampa both have one, and there are ones in several other countries. Then there are similarly-named museums like the Museum of Science in Boston or Academy of Science in San Francisco. The California Science Center used to be the California Museum of Science and Industry.
Maybe she was aware of many of them and asked where it was to determine which he’d visited. Or she simply hadn’t heard of it. I knew about Chicago because I went to it as a kid, but I didn’t know there was one in Tampa until I googled it. Every kid within 150 miles of Portland knows about the Oregon museum, but probably not a lot of people outside of Oregon do.
Definitely. As a kid, it was by far my favorite Chicago museum. Distant second was the Shedd. At any rate, I was not aware of people outside Chicago to be particularly familiar with it. The only museum I might expect people not from the area to know is the Art Institute (especially since it’s fully known as the Art Institute of Chicago) and maybe perhaps the Field Museum, but I’m not sure about that one. But it houses Sue the dinosaur, so maybe people are aware of it. Then again, maybe Sue is not that as well known outside Chicago, either.
One (possible) difference is that the Field conducts active research into paleontology, biology, cultural anthropology and other fields. So someone interested in those fields might be more likely to know about the Field Museum. MSI appears to be almost solely dedicated to educating its visitors (even its research page is about education or reactions of visitors to its exhibits). A noble pursuit but not one that necessarily gets your name out there.
What Exit?
It’s in Queens, just a stone’s throw from where I live.
I hadn’t heard of the Museum of Science and Industry until I was specifically looking at Chicago tour books in order to plan a road trip. That said, I’ve been to science museums all over the USA, and it’s definitely in my top five - maybe top three. Could even be # 1, but the top tier of science museums is pretty close together in quality.
I know what it is because I have been there and enjoyed it. I have only spent any significant time in Chicago once and asked around for things to do and The Museum of Science and Industry was one of the consensus picks. I can’t really say if I knew much about it before that or even that it existed at all because I don’t remember. It certainly isn’t famous like the various Smithsonian museums or many other really famous museums like some in NYC but I may have heard of it before in passing before I went there.
There’s a Museum of Science and Industry in Tampa, Florida as well. I bet you’ve never heard of that one. With the exception of a few internationally-known museums, I wouldn’t expect anyone from one city to actually know what random museums are in another city.
I’ve heard of it because I’ve visited Chicago (although not the museum itself). These sort of museums, like aquariums or natural history museums or art museum, outside of a few famous exceptions, are the sort of thing that I expect many (most?) large cities to have. I know about the one in Seattle because I live here. I know about the one in Portland because I visited it recently.
So it doesn’t seem like a sign of someone not well traveled. It just seems like a sign of someone who hasn’t been to Chicago (or didn’t specifically look up the local flavor of science museum while they were there). Assuming you haven’t spent much time in Seattle, could you name all of our equivalents without looking them up?
That said, Googling “Museum of Science and Industry” does have the Chicago one come up first, and it looks pretty great from its Wikipedia entry. I’m sorry I missed it. That might move it a little closer to the “famous” category, although it wasn’t famous enough for me to know about it if I hadn’t visited the city. It probably isn’t in Smithsonian or British Museum territory.
Well, anyone who read this thread completely would, since it’s mentioned in post #8. 
(Before this thread, I knew there was one in Oregon and one in Manchester, UK, and some others, but not specifically the one in Tampa.)
Well, that’s the crux of the OP’s question, innit? Is it a nationally or internationally known museum? The answer is no, but when you live in the city, it’s hard to tell sometimes. The Museum of Science and Industry is a very popular museum here with 1.5 million visitors a year (Field has 1.7; Art Institute has 1.8) so it’s difficult to gauge what is known beyond our borders. Like, for example, is the Field Museum nationally or internationally known? Is the Adler Planetarium? I have no clue. The only one I know for certain is the Art Institute, and it attracts only slightly more visitors than the others, except for the Shedd Aquarium, which attracts 1.9 million (!) So how are we to know if we don’t ask?
Many cities have some type of science museum that’s well-known locally. Chicago’s has a very generic-sounding name so it’s going to be hard for it to get name recognition out of the area.
In PA, because of the Carnegie in the west and the Franklin in the west, outside of a couple of the bigger NY/DC museums you would have a hard time getting any names at all. Maybe Wright-Patterson or some historic sites but Chicago would be a nil.
Very very anecdotal.
I grew up quite near this museum, back in the days when admission was free. The people I knew would say they were going to “the Field Museum” or “the aquarium” or “the historical museum” or “the art museum,” but when people referred simply to “the museum” they invariably meant Museum of Science and Industry.
I spent many rainy days cruising through the collections with friends and family, and to me it is still the Platonic Ideal of what a large museum can and should be (though the Museum of American History in the Smithsonian group is pretty darn close).
A couple of my friends and I were also very interested in license plates–how many different states can you find on a walk through the neighborhood? Our neighborhood, especially the parts nearest the U of C campus, provided very good pickings for this activity, but the MSI parking lot was exceptionally good–tons of plates from Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana, of course, but quite a few from Minnesota, Missouri, Ohio, and further-off points to states such as New York, Maryland, Mississippi, Texas, and Colorado, and sometimes even New England and the Pacific Coast.
From this my 12-year-old self concluded that “the museum” was clearly the most popular and most famous museum in the world. I was really kind of surprised a few years later when I went off to college in another state hundreds of miles away and discovered that very few of my classmates had heard of it, let alone been there. On well!
Georgia boy here. Never heard of it until this post.
I have heard of the Fields Museum, but only because I used to watch The Brain Scoop a lot.
Seriously? Not even the Art Institute of Chicago? I’ve met people halfway across the world who know what that is.