PALACE OF DISCOVERY

Wairarapa Times-Age, 18 October 1938, Page 8

PALACE OF DISCOVERY

REOPENED AS PERMANENT MUSEUM. The Palace of Discovery, one of the greatest successes of the Paris Exhibition, has been reopened as a permanent museum in an annex of the Grand Palais. It is unique among museums in that it is a “live” museum in which the visitor does not see merely a number of inanimate objects but finds 60 demonstrators ready to perform interesting scientific experiments before him and explain - their meaning and significance. Among the principal curiosities there is a high-power electric generator with its 5,000,000 volt spark ten feet long. The apparatus is one of only three in existence. The power of this spark represents roughly a weight of 2cwt dropped from a height of 33 feet. An experiment which always attracts a large crowd at 11 a.m. and 3 p.m. is the Poirson single-pole dynamo, producing a current of 50,000 amperes, the greatest intensity obtained by a single dynamo to this day. Nails, chains, and iron rings placed within the magnetic field dance in the air. The sun reproduces its own image in a room of this museum, The image has a diameter of over three feet, and sun spots are clearly visible. Four concerts of classical music are given every day on an electric organ. Television from the Eiffel Tower is another daily attraction, and the cinema gives performances a day, each lasting half an hour, with a programme of documentary scientific films on astronomy, wild animals and marvels of biology revealed by the microscope.