ENTER THE ELECTRIC ROOM….

Don’t panic it’s not a torture chamber but a futuristic room showing how electricity can travel and be used to entertain us. The electric room is inspired by the ‘amazing electric boy’ and 'galvanic shock machine', exhibited here by our founder Maria Short in the nineteenth century. Victorians believed that electric shocks were good for your health. It is possible you will get a small shock in the electric room, but don’t worry – it can’t hurt you.

Our Giant Plasmasphere, one of the biggest in the world, has pride of place in the ‘electric room’. Filled with Krypton and Neon gasses, a powerful electric charge passes from a tube filled with metal wool in the centre. Blue and white tendrils of light wander and spark across the Plasmasphere to the surface of the globe. When you touch it your hands act like a magnet, attracting the electric charge to you and channelling it through your body. You can light up a long fluorescent tube with your other hand – or pass a tiny shock to someone next to you as you almost touch fingers.

The Plasmasphere had to be made in Germany as there was nowhere in Britain that has a big enough glass blowing facility to produce a ball of this size and thickness. Two were made – Michael Jackson has the other one.

The room also features two luminglass plates – 20” diameter kinetic light plates that crackle with a frenzy of lightning strikes when you talk to them or touch them. There are also 2 crackle tubes – plasma tubes filled with gas which make your hands glow pink when you touch them – it’s a bit like seeing a live X-ray of your hand.

The latest additions are a marvellous green crackle ball - one of only three in the world and a lightning tube which crackles and fizzes while it makes electrical ‘spaghetti’. When you touch it you can feel the power travel trough your body.