If you watched the Mickey Mouse Club way back when, you might remember Professor Wonderful, who was, in reality, physics professor [Julius Sumner Miller]. He also had his own show, “Why Is It So?” along with appearances on talk shows. We recently ran across one of the shows from 1962 where [Miller] uses electromagnets to break a lamp.
[Miller] moved to Australia, and this episode is from the Australian version of “Why Is It So?” As you might expect, given the topic, the professor covers Oersted and Faraday.
We enjoyed not only the science but also the historical anecdotes. The professor’s delivery is interesting and entertaining, too. If you ever need to determine if an incandescent lamp is operating on AC or DC, the professor will show you how to employ a horseshoe magnet and, in fact, remotely destroys the lamp in the process.
Once that’s done, the topic changes to chimneys and straws. Towards the end, the professor moves to acoustics, playing music and visualizing waveforms with sugar.
While we haven’t seen a science show like this in a long time, we suppose there are many YouTube channels if you look for them. We’ve covered the great professor before. In the United States, he’s not as well remembered as Mr. Wizard, but we admire everyone who passes knowledge along to the next generation.
We had a science teacher in high-school that showed us many episodes of “Why is it so?”. This was the late 90s so many of the episodes were already ancient.
However, we loved them. Even the people who didn’t normally care about science. JSM was a quirky but charismatic dude.
The couple of old friends I still interact still yell “WATCH IT! WATCH IT NOW!” when we’re together.
Mr. Wizard (Don Herbert) and Prof. Miller were a big part of my Saturday mornings.
Judging by the video and others, this guy would have been slightly scary and baffling to young me. Half the time he’s not talking to the audience, he’s doing some private meta discourse to nobody in particular. He presents a topic haphazardly, from the middle, and then doesn’t give any answers, which seems to be his thing to “arouse curiosity”. Lots of things glossed over in rapid fire pace, throwing random equations or facts on the whiteboard, as if we’re seeing 20-30% cuts of what he’s actually talking about – except it’s him doing the editing, live.
He seems to bother the show host quite a bit as well, taking him for a spin and not giving him time to think. Not zany but crazy professor vibes in a bad way, though in other films where he’s talking to a lecture hall audience directly he seems to engage pleasantly.
Blackboard.
If you want to be exact, it’s most likely a dull green board, but we can’t see that from a grayscale film.
You’re being either ignorant or deliberately obtuse. A blackboard is a board to display things written in white/yellow chalk. A whiteboard is a board to display things written in colored pens.
Blackboards have fallen out of favor due to chalk dust, a shame because of the extreme low price of writing implement.
Yes.
Knowing that, why did you feel the need to respond?
Using chalk on slate is right up there as an unpleasant experience as scraping your fingernails on same said surface. It isn’t just the dust you can feel something tingle when you use it.
Maybe because it’s a TV show and not a physics class lecture? This is basically the same format as another TV classic – the infomercial – except they’re not trying to get you to buy something. Love them or hate them (probably hate them), advertisers know how to get people to pay attention to something.
No, he very much is trying to get the audience to buy something. He is trying to get them to buy curiosity and a love of science. That’s no bad thing but it doesn’t mean some of the same techniques can not be applied.
Wow, intense! Almost worth inventing a Time Machine for.
He was also a regular on The Hilarious House Of Frightenstein. A core memory for Canadians of a certain age.
Hah, I was just thinking that!
Why is it the area around the lamp goes black in the film? Is it a film quirk?
Early television camera quirk. Couldn’t really handle that amount of contrast. Oversaturated the phosphors in the image tube.
Watch the “Professor Miller’s pure joy as experiment takes unexpected turn” video. Early in the video he turns a directional desk lamp toward the camera. It’s a very cool problem with how the tubes respond to bright light sources.
Also, I miss the days where everyone wasn’t terrified of elemental mercury—back when a dropped thermometer turned into cool impromptu science experiments rather than a frantic evacuation. For Christmas one year my mom got me a transparent maze to navigate a blob of mercury through. The cover could just be unscrewed for bonus fun. They don’t make em like that anymore.
Aliens, obviously.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_camera_tube#Dark_halo
The full name was Mickey Mouse Clubhouse…😄👍
6-7!!
/s²
My favorite:
What Are Chain Reactions? (Mr. Wizard)
Official Mr.Wizard’s World Channel
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjEnrB18AL0
I’m an Aussie, and I remember his show, which was usually screened in the late afternoon before or after Dr Who. Used to watch both religiously. It must be 60 years since I’ve heard that plinky-plonky theme music. The show was slightly revamped later during the 1960s and renamed to ‘Why it is so’. Sometimes he had school kids acting as assistants, and they were often a little bit in awe and intimidated by him.
It was the mid 1960s, the lead up to the Apollo moon missions, and that along with him gave a young boy like me the impression that the US was very interested in developing science and technology. I even thought that one day I would move there for that reason. As it turned out that never happened and sadly a show like his would never be screened on mainstream TV today as it could not compete against sport and reality shows.
Dumb question maybe but… did people use to talk like that? In his time and place? Or did he develop that for the show?