THE MANIFESTATION OF ELECTRICITY: Sparks Museum of Electrical Innovation
There was a place in town I wanted to visit as I walked past it every day at work. There’s always something I say I’m going to do but it always costs too much. I kept saying I want to go to the Sparks Museum.
So my partner and I were standing in the alley behind the museum one day, preparing to safely dispose of a syringe that was lying in the doorway of an adjacent building. We were taking pictures for the report when a man popped into the alley from a back entrance.
“I work at the Spark’s Museum”, he said. “You guys are on it. We clean stuff out of this alley all the time.”He handed us both two free passes to the Museum and Megatron Show.
I asked my son to go with me.
The first interactive exhibit was a kitschy machine that used to be on the actual streets for public entertainment. You held the knob and the ground knob, or just made a group circle holding hands, put a quarter in, and ran an electrical current through your body for nervous tension, headache, etc. We got up to about 30 or so volts.
There were exhibits where you rubbed a rod on rabbit fur, and another where you held the knobs to see how much electricity you were putting out (also 30 to 40). All sorts of early gadgets with tubes and jars for conducting static electricity were displayed. Many early electrical scientists nearly killed themselves trying to work with this magical force. Probably some did, but they weren’t featured. Thomas Edison failed something like 10,000 times as he was innovating the incandescent bulb, many times due to the inability of investors to believe.
We perused the communication and sound frequency history, with exhibits featurely the Titanic, Morse Code (when I hit the long dash signal, my son son leaned back and closed his eyes as if he had flatlined), the communication towers that sent signals across Napoleonic Europe by changing the configuration of the towers structural components.There was a sound machine where you could make songs by holding one hand near the volume and moving the other near and far from the frequency or pitch receptor.
We were invited into the electrical show theater. It was dim. The stage had a Frankenstein-like body cage called the Cage of Doom, a metal hanging cage containing a skull, and a multitude of devices and red candles. We were presided over by portraits of Benjamin Franklin and the cold Serbian glare of Nikolai Tesla.
“This is the part where you are inducted into the Church of Scientology,” my son said. The lights went to black. “Yep, it begins.”The man doing the presentation was a physicist, you could tell. So wacky. He showed electrical sparks contained by a bubble in one of those machines anyone can buy online. Then he brought out a much bigger machine, turned it on, and said now it’s dangerous. You can’t see it and it’s not contained. He lit long incandescent bulbs by holding them to the machine and controlling the current with his hand. At last, he turned on the lightning machine, created a spark, and wielded the lamp like a light saber, controlling the sound vibration to play the theme from Star Wars. It was great.
Imagine all those inventors going through so many trials just to make this existing force of the universe compliant, directed, and useful. He reminded us that people didn’t always take light, heat, music, or communication for granted.
