page_title: Exploratorium
section_title: Founding and early years
hierarchical_section_title: Exploratorium / History / Founding and early years
caption_attribution_description: English: Frank Oppenheimer, founding director of the Exploratorium
context_page_description: The Exploratorium is a museum of science, technology, and arts in San Francisco. Characterized as "a mad scientist's penny arcade, a scientific funhouse, and an experimental laboratory all rolled into one", the participatory nature of its exhibits and its self-identification as a center for informal learning has led to it being cited as the prototype for participatory museums around the world.
  The Exploratorium was founded by physicist and educator Frank Oppenheimer and opened in 1969 at the Palace of Fine Arts, its home until January 2, 2013. On April 17, 2013, the Exploratorium reopened at Piers 15 and 17 on San Francisco's Embarcadero. The historic interior and exterior of Pier 15 was renovated extensively prior to the move, and is divided into several galleries mainly separated by content, including the physics of seeing and listening, Human Behavior, Living Systems, Tinkering, the Outdoor Gallery, and the Bay Observatory Gallery, which focuses on local environment, weather, and landscape.
  Since the museum's founding, over 1,000 participatory exhibits have been created, approximately 600 of which are on the floor at any given time.
context_section_description: The Exploratorium is the brainchild of Frank Oppenheimer, an experimental physicist and university professor. Oppenheimer, who worked on the Manhattan Project with his brother J. Robert Oppenheimer, was diverted from an academic career when he was forced to resign from his position at the University of Minnesota in 1949 as a result of an inquiry by the House Un-American Activities Committee. He was blacklisted from academic positions across the country, and withdrew with his family to run a Colorado cattle ranch for almost a decade.
  Oppenheimer also began lending a hand with science projects of local high school students, eventually becoming the sole science teacher at the high school in Pagosa Springs, Colorado. The field trips and experiments he did with his high school students would become a blueprint for the hands-on methods of teaching and learning he would later bring to the Exploratorium.
  When Oppenheimer was invited to join the University of Colorado's physics department in 1959, he found himself less interested in traditional laboratory research and much more interested in exploring methods of provoking curiosity and inquiry.  He received a grant from the National Science Foundation, which he used to build models of nearly a hundred science experiments. This "Library of Experiments" would become the core of the Exploratorium exhibit collection, and was the forerunner of the Exploratorium Cookbook, a manual explaining how to build these basic science exhibits.
  Convinced of the need for public museums to supplement science curricula at all levels, he toured Europe and studied museums on a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1965. Three European museums, encountered during that year, served as important influences on the founding of the Exploratorium: the Palais de la Découverte, which displayed models to teach scientific concepts and employed students as demonstrators, a practice that directly inspired the Exploratorium's much-lauded High School Explainer Program; the South Kensington Museum of Science and Art, which Oppenheimer and his wife visited frequently; and the Deutsches Museum in Munich, the world's largest science museum, which had a number of interactive displays that impressed the Oppenheimers.
  Back in the United States, Oppenheimer was invited to do the initial planning for a new branch of the Smithsonian, but he turned it down to work on what he called his "San Francisco project". In 1967, the Oppenheimers came to San Francisco with a view towards opening an independent museum of their own. Oppenheimer sought funding and support for the endeavor using a grassroots approach, bringing a written proposal and some handmade exhibits with him as he visited scientists, businesses, city and school officials, relatives, and friends. Many prominent scientists and cultural figures endorsed the project, and the offers of support in conjunction with a $50,000 grant from the San Francisco Foundation made the museum realizable.
  In late August 1969, the Exploratorium opened with little fanfare at the Palace of Fine Arts. Oppenheimer "simply opened the doors". Although the building needed many improvements, Oppenheimer couldn't afford to make the changes, and decided to allow the public to come and watch exhibits being built and changes being made as part of the participatory ethos of the institution. An early proposal would have erected a wall between the workshop where exhibits were being developed and the main visitor areas.  Instead, Oppenheimer insisted that the workshop be placed without a wall, right next to the main entrance so that visitors could experience "the way a shop smells when you burn the wood in a saw, or smell the oil from a lathe". Above the workshop was a sign, made by the wife of George Gamow, a physicist, educator, and friend of Oppenheimer who had died just a year before the opening of the Exploratorium. The inscription said "Here Is Being Created the Exploratorium a Community Museum Dedicated to Awareness".  (Today, a copy of this motto is inscribed above the main entrance to the new Exploratorium at 
caption: Frank Oppenheimer, founder of the Exploratorium
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