A month short of his 90th birthday Donald Jeffrey Herbert, better known to Boomers as Mr. Wizard, died today. The Associated Press has a short obituary.
For a lot of us, this was our first taste of science, and you could do it in your kitchen without a lot of equipment or special ingredients. He was responsible for a lot people entering science, and was a hell of a teacher.
Update: NPR has a remembrance by Ira Flatow and links to clips of the show.
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I still remember being fascinated by science from watching his shows and I can still remember some of the simple but amazing experiments. Remember the demonstrations of air pressure using a hard boiled egg and a milk bottle or the even more impressive one using a 1 gallon metal can by evacuating it using steam and then screwing the lid on and watching atmospheric pressure crush the can as the vapor cooled inside. Neat stuff. Sure left an impression on me.
These days we don’t have milk bottles or one gallon cans.
Thing was, you could duplicate the experiments. You could do it yourself and see that it worked. Imagination is one of the things that is missing from kids toys these days. Too much realism and not enough fantasy. The kids are required to add their own personality and creativity to play, everything is scripted.
Sigh. The good die young. He deserved to live another hundred years for the influence he had on all of us when we were kids.
R.I.P., Mr. Herbert; you really were a wizard at teaching science.
Not bad for a drama major. He was also in B-24s in Italy, like my Dad.