Dr. Frank Oppenheimer

Frank Oppenheimer was born in 1912 in New York City. He attended Johns Hopkins University and later earned a Ph.D. at California Institute of Technology, doing experiments on artificially induced radiation.

In 1941, Frank began working on uranium isotope separation, and in 1945, he joined the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos. This top secret effort to produce a fission bomb was headed by Frank's brother, Robert Oppenheimer.

After the war, Frank became a physics professor at the University of Minnesota. But in 1949, he was forced to resign as a result of harassment by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Blackballed by McCarthy-era paranoia, Frank was unable to continue his physics research, and spent the next ten years as a cattle rancher in Pagosa Springs, Colorado.

In 1957, he was drawn back into education as a science teacher at the local high school, which had fewer than 300 students and only one science teacher for all the grades. A tireless and innovative teacher, he took students to the dump and used abandoned auto parts to teach principles of mechanics, heat, and electricity.

With improvement in the political climate, Frank was offered an appointment at the University of Colorado in 1959. There, he revamped the teaching laboratory, creating a "Library of Experiments" that was in many ways a prototype for the Exploratorium.

In 1965, while in Europe on a Guggenheim fellowship, Frank explored and studied European museums and became convinced of the need for science museums as a supplement for science curricula in the United States. On returning home, he was invited to plan a new branch of the Smithsonian, but declined, preferring instead to work on what he called his "San Francisco project"—a museum of his own.

Frank proposed to house his new museum in the vacant Palace of Fine Arts in the Marina district of San Francisco. The proposal was accepted, and in 1969, with no publicity or fanfare, the doors opened to Frank's "Exploratorium." Frank nurtured and shaped the growing museum until 1985, when he died from lung cancer.

The qualities that make the Exploratorium special are the same qualities that made Frank Oppenheimer so special: an insistence on excellence, a knack for finding new ways of looking at things, a lack of pretentiousness, and a respect for invention and play.

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