JAPANESE LANTERN | Bengali
Channel: Arvind Gupta
Date: 2015-11-26

You can make this beautiful Japanese lantern using simple things in the house. You will need a large plastic bottle, card, scissors, glue, wire etc. Cut the only the cylindrical part of the bottle. Remove the tapered portion on the top and the bottom. Only the middle cylinder will remain. Now take a thick circular card and draw 8 such vanes and then cut them. Make a hole in the middle. You can see the slits and the raised vanes. Take the metal base of an old battery cell. It has a nice dimple in its centre. Apply glue to the metal base. Also glue the card centre and then stick the metal base to it. This will make a very smooth metal PIVOT. The dimple will be below. Its convex surface will be on the top. Apply glue to the entire rim of the card sheet and stick it to the cylinder. Apply more glue to adhere the cylinder in place. Place this cylinder on top of a bulb. The bulb has a vertical wire taped to it. The cylinder is pivoted on the wire’s tip and should be able to rotate very freely on it. If the bulb is switched ON then hot air from below gushes us passes through the card vanes and rotates the cylinder. Decorate the cylinder from outside with animal pictures. 
Place the lantern in the dark and switch on the bulb. Hot air will move up and rotate the cylinder continuously at a slow speed. And you will be able to enjoy a no-sound movie picture. You can place a cylinder made out of butter-paper on top. Then the animal shadows will fall on this still cylinder and will see a very beautiful shadow play of images.  

This work is supported by IUCAA (www.iucaa.ernet.in) and TATA Trust (www.tata.com/aboutus/sub_index/Tata-trusts)

Credits:,Ashok Rupner, Shivaji Mane, Jyoti Hiremath, Arvind Gupta, Vidula Mhaiskar, Pratham, Krishnanjan Mondal TATA Trust: Education is one of the key focus areas for Tata Trusts, aiming towards enabling access of quality education to the underprivileged population in India. To facilitate quality in teaching and learning of Science education through workshops, capacity building and resource creation, Tata Trusts have been supporting Muktangan Vigyan Shodhika (MVS), IUCAA's Children’s Science Centre, since inception. To know more about other initiatives of Tata Trusts, please visit www.tatatrusts.org