Ohio: Cleveland – Great Lakes Science Center

🔬 Getting Our Science On at the Great Lakes Science Center, Cleveland

We had earmarked the morning for the Great Lakes Science Center, which sits rather neatly sandwiched between the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Cleveland Browns’ football stadium on the southern shore of Lake Erie. Not a bad bit of urban planning, that — culture, sport and science all within shouting distance of each other.

It was one of those crisp, bright mornings where the sky is a brilliant blue and you feel almost optimistic about the day ahead, right up until the wind off Lake Erie reminds you that you are, in fact, in Ohio in autumn and not the south of France. We wrapped up and walked the short distance from our hotel, which was handy enough given that nobody in our family had yet had their second cup of coffee.

The Science Center itself opened in 1996, part of a broader effort to redevelop Cleveland’s North Coast Harbour — a waterfront area that had seen better days after the collapse of the city’s heavy manufacturing base in the latter half of the 20th century. Cleveland had once been an absolute industrial powerhouse. At its peak in the early 1900s, it was one of the five largest cities in the United States, a city built on steel, oil refining, and shipping traffic moving through the Great Lakes. John D. Rockefeller — yes, that Rockefeller — made his first fortune here in the 1860s. The Great Lakes Science Center was, in many ways, part of Cleveland’s attempt to reinvent itself for a knowledge economy. Whether it fully succeeded is a question for economists and city planners, but as a science centre, it does a cracking job.

And I’ll say it plainly: this was one of the best science centres we have visited. Not the biggest, not the flashiest, but genuinely well put together, with a proper range of hands-on exhibits that made you feel like you were actually learning something rather than just queuing to press a button that makes a light flash. The place covers a broad sweep of scientific disciplines, and there is enough variety that you can spend a full day here without running out of things to look at.

Unless you are Jack and Emily, in which case you spend the day gravitating with unerring instinct towards anything involving hang gliding simulators and flight simulation rigs. We, the responsible adults, made our best efforts to steer them towards what we considered the more educational end of the spectrum. They were not impressed. We were apparently very boring. Noted.

The centre is organised into several distinct exhibit halls, each worth a bit of your time:

The NASA Glenn Visitor Center is a particular highlight, and not just because NASA things are inherently cool. The Glenn Research Center — named after John Glenn, the Ohio-born astronaut who in 1962 became the first American to orbit the Earth — is one of NASA’s ten major field installations and is located just a few miles west of Cleveland. It has been operating since 1942, when it was established as the Aircraft Engine Research Laboratory. The visitor centre here covers the history and science of space travel in some depth, looking at the very real and very unglamorous challenges of keeping human beings alive in space — things like radiation exposure, muscle atrophy, fluid redistribution in the body, and the psychological effects of being cooped up in a tin can hundreds of miles above the Earth. Fascinating stuff, even if it does rather put you off the idea of becoming an astronaut.

The Cleveland Creates Zone takes a different approach entirely, leaning into the creative and design side of science. The idea is to give visitors — particularly younger ones — the materials and the processes to actually build things. It draws on design thinking and engineering methodology, encouraging people to iterate and problem-solve rather than just follow instructions. It is the sort of exhibit that would have been deeply fashionable in a 1990s business management book. Fortunately, it is also genuinely engaging.

The William G. Mather Steamship is moored just outside and costs a bit extra to board, but if you have any interest in industrial history it is worth every penny. The Mather is a 618-foot bulk freighter — that is nearly two football pitches in length, for those of us who think in those terms — and it once carried iron ore, coal, and limestone across the Great Lakes. Built in 1925, it worked these waters for over five decades, part of the vast fleet of vessels that made the Great Lakes region the industrial engine of North America. Northern Ohio’s position at the heart of the Great Lakes system meant it had access to iron ore from Minnesota’s Iron Range, coal from Appalachia, and limestone from Michigan — all the raw ingredients for steel production. At its height, Cleveland’s steel mills were producing a significant chunk of American steel output. The Mather is a beautiful, melancholy reminder of all that.

Biomedtech does what it says on the tin, exploring the world of genomics, stem cell research, prosthetics, functional electrical stimulation — or FES, which sounds like it ought to be a government department — and medical imaging. It does so through a mixture of interactive exhibits, video displays, and hands-on demonstrations. This is not the easiest subject matter to make accessible to a general audience, but the Science Center does a reasonable job of it.

Science Phenomena is more straightforwardly enjoyable — a collection of interactive exhibits covering magnetism, light, optics, motion, mechanics, sound and resonance. The kind of thing where you find yourself spending twenty minutes doing something you could have done at school in 1978, except that nobody explained it properly at the time and now, at last, it makes sense.

Beyond the permanent exhibits, the Science Center runs a rolling programme of camps, special events and educational programmes throughout the year. On the day we visited there was quite a lot on, which was a pleasant surprise. The staff were clearly enthusiastic and ran several live demonstrations during the day. In a dedicated lab room, they put on shows with the help of willing volunteers from the audience — children, mostly, who were considerably more willing than any adult in the room — exploring various aspects of science in a hands-on and genuinely entertaining way.

In the main auditorium, the star of the show was an enormous Van de Graaff generator. For those unfamiliar, a Van de Graaff generator is a device that builds up a very large static electrical charge. They were invented in the early 1930s by American physicist Robert J. Van de Graaff, originally for use in particle physics research, though they have since found a second career in making school children’s hair stand on end. The one at the Science Center is a serious piece of kit, and the demonstration was properly spectacular. There is something childishly satisfying about watching electricity do dramatic things in a controlled environment. Even the adults were paying attention.

We rounded off the day in the dome theatre, which shows IMAX films projected onto the interior of the dome itself. It is one of those genuinely immersive experiences that reminds you why people still bother going out to see things in person rather than watching them on a laptop. The film programme changes regularly, so it is worth checking the Science Center’s website before you visit to see what is currently showing.

All in all, a very well-spent day. Even Jack and Emily grudgingly admitted it had been good, which in teenage terms is roughly equivalent to a standing ovation.