Tom Tits Experiment, Södertälje, Sweden
In 2006, Tom Tits Experiment, a science center located south of Stockholm in Södertälje, Sweden, received the European Museum Forum’s Micheletti Award, a prize established in 1996 that goes to the year’s most promising technical or industrial museum. The award citation explains that Tom Tits deserves attention not only because of its content, judged to be “amongst the most exciting in Europe,” but also because of its new nursery school, its activities and tours for older children, and its excellent and dedicated staff.{1}
When we were asked to write this review of Tom Tits for Technology and Culture, however, we wondered at first how a hands-on science center managed to capture a prize intended for museums—that is, we wondered whether “science centers” actually count as proper “museums.” But as the nestor of museology who founded the European Museum Forum, Kenneth Hudson, once wrote, it is “almost impossible to define a museum in a way which is universally acceptable.” For as society itself has evolved, so too has the concept of the museum.{2} Today, in fact, the International Council of Museums, which is closely related to UNESCO, officially recognizes science centers as legitimate museums.{3}
Museum professionals may not agree with this, of course. But if we take a longer view of the situation, we find that science centers, natural history museums, and museums of science and technology have shared a great deal in common in recent decades. During the late 1960s, when a number of large science centers were founded in North America—the Exploratorium in San Francisco, for example, and the Ontario Science Centre in London—they drew much of their inspiration from experiments carried out at the Deutsches Museum in Munich and at the Science Museum in London.{4} Today, according to the European Network of Science Centres and Museums, the situation is reversed, and museums of natural history and museums of science and technology now regularly look to science centers for inspiration.{5}
Museums and science centers are also alike in that both serve as informal educational institutions. Since its inception in 1977, the European Museum Forum has consistently worked to improve the quality of the museum experience by embracing visitor-friendly and interactive educational features, and this is why Tom Tits won the forum’s 2006 award. The official motto of Tom Tits Experiment is “experiment as methodology,” and in its prize citation, the forum emphasized the pedagogical value of the center’s stated goal: to explain basic scientific principles in a manner that is easily accessible to the visiting public, particularly younger visitors who might be inspired to continue to explore the world of science.
Our Experiment
Tom Tits Experiment is located in an old Alfa-Laval factory that was, at the turn of the twentieth century, the largest employer in Södertälje (fig. 1). The center’s name dates to the nineteenth century as well, when the French magazine L’Illustration published a series of articles describing do-it-yourself scientific experiments for children. Pseudonymously written by “Tom Tit,” these articles were published in a volume titled La Science Amusante (1890), which was quickly translated into several languages. When the center itself was established in 1987, its educational ambitions seemed to resonate with those of L’Illustration’s fictional author. Hence the unusual name.{6}
Fig. 1 Tom Tits Experiment is located in an old industrial building in Södertälje, Sweden, just south of Stockholm. (Author photo.)
We went to Tom Tits on a Friday afternoon in early January 2007, and to find out if it lives up to its pedagogical goals, we brought along a test panel consisting of three girls, twins the age of six and a three year old. The children in our test panel were of course too young to truly grasp the underlying principles of many of the experiments at the center. But nearly everything at Tom Tits fascinated them, and at times it was difficult to steer them along from station to station.
Tom Tits consists of four floors filled with hundreds of experiment stations, as well as a large garden (which is closed during the winter). A floor plan available at the entrance is an invaluable guide to the center’s many features. One can also purchase or borrow a large catalog containing detailed descriptions of each of the experiments. This catalog is useful, particularly since there are no printed panels or other explanations of the experiments at any of the stations, but it cannot replace the simpler floor plan as a navigational aid. Lockers are available at the entrance as well, and there is also a small area near the front doors where visitors can eat what they have brought along. A larger cafeteria lies on the second floor, adjacent to a gift shop selling brainteasers and replicas of the center’s experiments along with puzzles, books, postcards, and other standard museum souvenirs.
The experiments themselves are organized thematically, although the themes are not always transparent to visitors. The most obvious of them is the body, which is featured in a spacious room on the top floor. There, our panel was able to explore the different parts of the brain; remove and replace the internal organs of a full-scale human model (fig. 2); discover where new teeth are hidden on a six year old; and learn to their amazement that their dad actually contains two large demijohns of water!
Fig. 2 What parts do we consist of and where do they fit? (Author photo.)
The most notable attraction on the third floor was the section on chemistry. Here, Tom Tits regularly holds lectures for children on field trips in a small auditorium in which every chair represents an element on the periodic table. Schools can also arrange for the center to conduct chemical demonstrations and other experiments in this area. Next to this periodic-table room lies a thematic cluster on optics and optical illusions; however, the passive, hands-off nature of this section meant that our panel simply walked through and glanced at its colorful illustrations.
One of the most attractive thematic sections for our young panel was a station on the second floor that dealt with the properties of water. Here, the concept of surface tension was displayed in a cupola fountain (a large example of which one can enter during the summer); the inertia of a mass in motion was illustrated by a vortex of swirling water; and the principle of siphoning was demonstrated with a pair of cylinders and a tube. Children flocked to this section like bees to honey, and every parent there was grateful for the aprons provided for them.
A large aquarium filled with all sorts of fish is also located on the second floor of the center, not far from the section on water, and it features a central viewing area that is accessible to those small enough to crawl into it. Nearby, a section on mathematics features an oversized table and chairs (to remind adults of the way their children experience kitchen furniture and to teach their kids about the concept of scale), as well as a set of marbles on a tilted plane (to demonstrate the principle of the normal or Gaussian distribution).
A popular attraction on the first floor was a large bubble-maker, which is used to illustrate the reflection and refraction of light (fig. 3). Equally popular was a station designed to demonstrate energy-state changes by way of a marble that runs along a wooden track. A separate room on the first floor housed the most technologically oriented stations at Tom Tits, including a gear demonstration using cogs from an actual truck, as well as one in which visitors can test their wooden block–placing skills against those of a block-placing robot. In the center of this technology cluster stood the front cabin of a large truck, and our three-year-old panel member would have been content to spend the rest of the afternoon playing with its steering wheel and fiddling with its switches and dials.
Fig. 3 One of our panel members plays with the bubble generator, which illustrates the reflection and refraction of light. (Author photo.)
As previously mentioned, there are no explanatory panels or posters next to the experiments themselves, but detailed descriptions of each of them do appear in the center’s printed catalog. This catalog occasionally mentions the first person to have described and/or explained a certain phenomenon. For example, it explains that it was Bernoulli who first discovered that a ball placed just outside of a vertical stream of air will be pulled back into the stream. Fortunately for us grown-ups, the station demonstrating this was strategically located next to the cafeteria, allowing us to enjoy a cup of coffee while our test panel repeatedly tested the validity of Bernoulli’s Principle.
The citations in this catalog do not appear to celebrate humankind’s ingenuity, however, for they are more or less factual in character and seem to be designed to convey a timeless sense of curiosity over the principles of nature rather than a narrative of progress. Unfortunately, its detached tone and lack of contextual material also means that the catalog does not highlight any of the adverse consequences of scientific and technological change. One exception occurs in the center’s section on ecology, which draws attention to the ways in which hydroelectric power generation can interfere with the migrations of salmon.{7}
Tom Tits features very few computers and other multimedia installations to guide one’s movements through the stations. Instead, the individual experiments are simple, hands-on, intuitive, and can be explored in any order. For our panel, it was a joy to learn that they were actually expected to touch and play with everything. Hopefully, they and the other children who explore the center will remember what they have learned and will be inspired to help shape the scientific and technological decisions of tomorrow.
For the time being, though, our test panel remembers Tom Tits as a wonderful place to play, inquire, interact, and learn, and they have declared unanimously that they wish to return in the near future. The reviewers will be delighted to join them.
{1} European Museum of the Year Award: The Awards, 2006 (brochure); European Museum of the Year Award: The Candidates, 2006 (brochure).
{2} Kenneth Hudson, The European Museum of the Year Award, 1977–1997: A Mirror and a Catalyst of European Museum Change and Development. Available online at http://www.europeanmuseumforum.org (accessed 23 March 2007), p. 3 (quote).
{3} Ibid.
{4} Exploratorium, http://www.exploratorium.edu (accessed 23 March 2007).
{5} The European Network of Science Centres and Museums, http://www.ecsite.net (accessed 23 March 2007).
{6} Tom Tits Experiment, http://www.tomtit.se (accessed 23 March 2007).
{7} An alternative framework is favored at a smaller science center called Teknorama, which was inaugurated in 1985 (and is thus approximately the same age as Tom Tits); Teknorama is located at the Swedish National Museum of Science and Technology in Stockholm. At Teknorama, the experiments are historically situated and the museum emphasizes the importance of placing science and technology into a wider context in order to “understand the consequences of technological development for people and our society—past, present, and future” (National Museum of Science and Technology in Sweden, http://www.tekniskamuseet.se [accessed 23 March 2007]).
Anna Storm, a doctoral candidate in the Department of the History of Science and Technology at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, is writing a dissertation about the reinterpretation and reuse of industrial areas. Nina Wormbs is an assistant professor in the same department and is working on media history and frequency allocation processes.
Copyright© 2007, the Society for the History of Technology