The lecture demos team works in the shop to build spark chambers, giant jungle gyms, bicycles that generate electricity, ripple tanks, and rocket cars that decorate the halls of the storage room across the hall.

“Those guys seem to be very good with their hands,” said Gregory Tucci, Senior Lecturer in Chemistry and Chemical Biology, who has worked with the lecture demos team for years. “With a lot of these demos, it has to be something that you bring into the world yourself.”

In the ante-chamber of the storage room, the walls are lined with shiny “relativity” train tracks, a pool table that showcases inelastic and elastic collisions, and a vintage Carbonari light source, originally a movie projector.

Some of the items are straight out of a science fiction movie: for example, a giant yo-yo, an armillary sphere, a dozen bowling balls from a Newton’s cradle machine project that never materialized, and a cage full of mousetraps to simulate the type of chain reaction that characterizes a nuclear explosion all adorn the space.

“When I show new faculty around, I always show them the demonstrations,” Tucci said. “There are not a lot of places in the country who have what we have at our disposal.”

Over in the physics wing of the prep room, a 1934 Tesla coil from Radcliffe sits beside a tub full of wooden vectors, which is around the corner from a set of French tuning forks from the 1800s.

“We have close to 1,000 demos,” Reuckner said. “When I came here, it was a tenth of that.”

On the chemistry side are cabinets with 80-year-old bromine and chlorine, as well as a large model of a double helix that’s been in the works for about 15 years, Rosenberg said.

Some of the items are simply enormous, and many are draped with stuffed animals that play a part in various demos. One stuffed toy holds a special place in the team’s heart: their mascot, a small stuffed brown dog named “Demo Dog.”

“He went to Harvard,” Goodale said.  “He just never went home.”

Knowing their way around the storage and prep rooms—and being able to grab a device at a moment’s notice—are all part of the lecture demo team’s job description. After all, even the most complex demos must be assembled in just about seven minutes, the time between two back-to-back classes.

A DEMO’S WORTH 1,000 WORDS

When setting up demos, the team must guide professors who have varying levels of familiarity with demonstration science, they said. Newer faculty often need more help brainstorming, while seasoned professors may need no more than an expert backstage to flip a switch if something goes wrong.

“They’re great, they try to anticipate your needs, they try to keep things in repair,” Kirshner said. “You want to make sure the brakes work on the rocket car, for example.”

The team sometimes likes to pull little jokes, Tucci added—for example, a “little demonstration bear” tends to pop up in the most unexpected places during demos.