We started the exploratory in Bristol, which was hands-on science centre. It was quite an ambitious project. It was the first in Britain but not the first in the world, I hasten to add. The first one in modern times really goes back to Bacon I think actually, in the 17th century, you know.
He only imagined it.
He imagined it, absolutely, it was an imaginary island. He imagined it but at least he imagined it, which is something. Absolutely right. Well, the first chap who really did this actually was Frank Oppenheimer who was Robert Oppenheimer’s brother who, of course, did the atom bomb in the war. Frank was his younger brother who was also a physicist, and a delightful man actually. Well, I actually gave a lecture in San Francisco in 1969 to the new Eye Research Institute, it was called the The Smith-Kettlewell Lecture, I gave the first one which was The Smith-Kettlewell Eye Institute. Now, this is the sort of important thing in my life really. Frank went to this lecture which was all about illusions, perception and knowledge in the brain, all that sort of stuff, it was a sort of philosophy of perception. Frank was a physicist but he really liked this because it had phenomena, you could make measurements and it was sort of philosophy but linked very much with science and it appealed to him. And I got to know Frank extremely well, we travelled around America a lot together and he had just got his exploritorium going the year before actually, which was at that time just an empty shell really, a huge great building. I don’t think there was anybody in it yet; he’d just got the thing there. So anyway we did a lot of discussion on how to get perception into a science centre so that people going round the exhibition could do experiments on themselves and on their friends, link what was going on in their minds and their brains to physics, and he really liked this a lot and I got interested in his physics and he got interested in my perception so it was a very sort of happy situation, quite honestly, and it’s really what got The Exploratorium going. Actually, I think I had quite a significant effect in the way it was planned and designed and developed actually. Well, then ten years later, I sort of started to think of myself, I was coming near retirement, why don’t we start something like that in Britain, you see? So we did. We started The Exploratory, I dropped a syllable, I started with the Exploritorium and then it became The Exploratory, which was in Temple Meads, the Brunel railway station here, before that in the Victoria Rooms, it ran for quite a long time in Bristol, about 15 years, and we had two million kids round in ten years at Temple Meads, that wasn’t bad, and it was really, I thought, really quite successful and it was great fun. They could do their own thing, they could do experiments, they could try out their own ideas, it was very much hands-on, very little money but it didn’t matter, I don’t think.
