Topical Guide 593
Mark Dorset
Education: Equipment for: Educational Films, Animated
Where Do You Stop? Chapter 12:
THE MOVIE Miss Rheingold showed us was called Quanto the Minimum. It was developed, or at least sponsored, by the telephone company, and it featured a tiny cartoon character, Quanto the Minimum himself, who explored the constitution of matter as it was then understood. Try as I might, I’ve been unable to scare up a copy of this film to review for this book, so I will have to rely on memory to summarize it for you.
As I recall, Quanto was an impish sort, sarcastic and even a bit nasty. He seemed always to be telling us, the captive audience, how stupid or ignorant we were.
Well, I haven’t been able to find a copy of Quanto the Minimum either, so here’s a copy of “The Coriolis Effect” from the Bell Telephone Science Hour in 1958:
Added October 18, 2023, two days after the original posting date of this Topical Guide entry: In a personal communication, Madeline Kraft has pointed out to me that Hemo the Magnificent is the mostly likely target of or inspiration for Kraft’s parody Quanto the Minimum. Here it is, with thanks and a tip of the Dorset hat to Madeline:
Education: Methods: Demonstration
Where Do You Stop? Chapter 12:
Among all the marvels in Quanto the Minimum, however, the universal favorite was a demonstration of the mousetrap model of a fission reaction. In this demonstration, a Ping-Pong table was covered with mousetraps, densely packed, but set at angles to one another, so that the model wouldn’t seem to be regularizing matter too artificially. All of the mousetraps were cocked and ready to spring, and resting on the wire bail of each was a Ping-Pong ball.
An announcer appeared at the side of the Ping-Pong table. Quanto leaped onto the screen, said, “Keep your eye on this guy,” and leaped off, laughing.
The announcer waved his hand toward the Ping-Pong table, taking in its entire magnificent array of cocked traps and ready balls, and said in defiance of all logic, “This is Uranium 235.”
Then he went on to explain some things he seemed no clearer about than we were. He seemed to keep losing the distinction between the Ping-Pong ball he was holding as the Ping-Pong ball it actually was and the neutron it was meant to represent. Whenever he said that a neutron was used to bombard the Uranium 235 he made a dart-throwing motion with his hand, suggesting that the bombarding process was a heck of a lot like dart throwing, or at least that was the impression it left on most of us. When he had finished his taxing explanation, he said, “And this is the result,” and with coy insouciance tossed the ball into the array of traps.
See also:
Education: Early Childhood, Benefits of TG 103; Childhood Education: Unintended Consequences of TG 112; Continuing: Learning a Foreign Language TG 396; Equipment for: Blackboards (Chalkboards) TG 578
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