The Qualicum Beach Museum’s Discovery Centre celebrated the addition of a new interactive station last week that seeks to show the history of lightbulbs and how their design has improved.
Planned and partially built by the Friends of the Discovery Centre, the station has a crank hooked up to three lightbulbs of different designs and a tube with a ping pong ball. Turning the crank lights up one of the bulbs, or blows the ping pong ball into the air, but requires different levels of cranking to get them going because of different energy consumption requirements.
“It’s science through history,” said Tony Taylor who led the project. The station is the Discovery Centre’s second such display, and the FODC has hopes of finding money to build several others, with the next demonstrating how much energy a wind turbine and solar panels can collect while providing more light for the space.
This latest station was built with a $2,000 grant from BC Hydro, $3,500 in BC Arts Council Project funding and $4,000 from the RDN’s Community Economic Development Grant.
— NEWS staff