The Exploratorium was conceived to communicate a conviction that nature and people can be both understandable and full of newly discovered magic. The Exploratorium was conceived by physicist Frank Oppenheimer (1912–1985). It was Oppenheimer's vision to create a collection of experiments that would make natural phenomena accessible and understandable to everyone. While a professor at the University of Colorado, Oppenheimer began to focus on the role of experimentation in learning. There, he replaced the standard physics laboratory course with a "Library of Experiments," in which students could learn at their own pace and according to their own inclinations. This and visits to European museums convinced Oppenheimer of the vital need for museums of science in the United States. After much searching, Oppenheimer secured a home for his museum in San Francisco, at the Palace of Fine Arts, a vacant remnant of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915. When the doors opened in 1969, there were just a few dozen exhibits, most of them borrowed.

Exploratorium, 1969

Quickly, the "shop" established itself as the heart of the museum—and of Frank Oppenheimer's unpretentious, hands-on philosophy. Equipped for carpentry, machining, welding, and electronics, the shop is where Exploratorium exhibits are built and repaired. The shop is almost the first thing a visitor sees on entering the museum, and just outside the shop is an area where new exhibit prototypes are tested and tinkered with.

The Exploratorium grew rapidly as more and more new exhibits were built. In 1980, cramped for space by its growing collection of exhibits, the museum built a mezzanine within the exhibition hall. This created 15,000 more square feet of space for exhibits on everything from light and color, sound, music, patterns, language, and electricity.

Though Frank Oppenheimer died in 1985, his spirit lives on in the Exploratorium's exhibits, which are intriguing, thoughtful, playful, sometimes strange, and sometimes beautiful. Today, there are hundreds of exhibits in this museum of science, art, and human perception, visited by over half a million people each year.

Exploratorium, 1999

From 1991 - 2005, the Exploratorium was directed by French physicist and science educator Goéry Delacôte. During his tenure, Dr. Delacôte worked toward extending the reach of the museum through teacher professional-development programs, on-line resources, and museum partnerships. He guided the activity of the museum into new areas of interest, including the important new domains of research in life sciences and cognition. Besides focusing on the creation of new exhibit sections, he concentrated efforts on the redevelopment of major exhibition areas, including exhibits on physical phenomena, visual perception, and the physics of sound. A visitor research group was established to inform the work and the field, the exhibition space was renovated and enlarged, and the museum has expanded into facilities at the nearby Presidio National Park.

As part of creating a "networked" Exploratorium, Dr. Delacôte focused not only on bringing the Exploratorium to the world, but also on bringing the world to the Exploratorium. Workshops bring teachers and teacher developers from around the country to the Exploratorium, where they learn inquiry-based teaching techniques. The newly formed Center for Informal Learning and Schools (CILS), a collaboration with King's College, London, and the University of California at Santa Cruz, uses the museum as a laboratory for examining informal science education and its relationship to K-12 education. The Exploratorium's Web site offers thousands of pages of unique on-line exhibits and teacher resources. Webcasts—live connections with distant sites that are broadcast over the World Wide Web—have focused on bringing "real science" into view, from a total solar eclipse in Africa to the daily eruptions of a volcano in Antarctica.

Through institutes, workshops, and exhibit sales and rentals, the Exploratorium has also exported its exhibitry, expertise, and teaching philosophy to museums throughout the U.S. and around the world. In 1999, the Exploratorium developed the first of many ongoing partnerships with other science museums as part of the Exploratorium Network for Exhibit-based Teaching (ExNET), an international network of museums dedicated to using exhibits to support science education.

Even as the Exploratorium increasingly "goes global," its mission remains unchanged. In the words of Dr. Delacôte, "The very essence of an informal science center is the daily challenge of making the fundamentals of science as accessible to as many people as possible."