1960s promo of science museum Evoluon (video)

The Eindhoven science museum Evoluon had to close its doors in the 1980s, but a 12-minute-long promotional film made in 1968 provides a fascinating insight into the experience for those who never got to see the real thing.

Visitors would enter a UFO-like building perched on top of a glass frame, pay at turnstiles and take an elevator to the saucer section. There they would be greeted by exhibits about motion, magnetism, engineering, the human body, sound, light, society and more. The basement had a popular electronic speech synthesizer that could be made to say the word ‘koffie’ (‘coffee’) using different inflections.

A lot of the exhibits were operated by the visitors themselves.

The film would find an unexpected audience in the UK as it had been selected by the BBC as one of its 158 colour trade test films which were broadcast during intervals in the regular BBC2 programming. The idea was to give electronics store owners a chance to show off their colour TV sets to shoppers.

The film was produced by Ted de Wit and director Ronny Erends and the music was made by Jaap Hofland and the Moonliners.

See also: Evoluon architect Leo de Bever dies.

(Image: crop of the video)

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 29th, 2015 at 12:38 pm and is filed under Science, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Tags: BBC, Eindhoven, Evoluon, Jaap Hofland, Moonliners, Ronny Erends, Ted de Wit, United Kingdom