VDNKh. Professor Sokolov. 1988.
In 1988, my father and I wandered into the "Youth" pavilion at VDNKh. I was 9 years old. Many different exhibits in small partitioned corners. Among them: Entertaining Physics by Nikolai Nikolaevich Sokolov. I only learned today that he was N.N.; for me it had always been simply "Professor Sokolov’s exhibition."
In the first photo: either the exact same gyroscope we saw then, or one very similar. The demonstration made a huge impression on me. For the first time I saw not a shaky hand-spun top, but a powerful near-industrial setup where motion laws looked alien - yet usable, something you could literally rely on.
The third photo is a solenoid wound on a plastic frame. It could not be switched on for long because it overheated. But there were several fun experiments with it. In the photo it lies on a black-painted aluminum stand. If you turned the laboratory autotransformer knob, the solenoid clearly rose into the air a little. My five-minute video with postman Pechkin began exactly with that: we placed a letter on the solenoid, and the active field brought the letter into frame.
The fourth photo is a laboratory gyroscope used for qualitative demonstrations. Ten years later I met it again in the general physics lab at MSU Physics Department and learned that in fact it can be used for quantitative studies too.
I grabbed these photos from this video. Sokolov’s exhibit collection migrated between VDNKh, the Polytechnic Museum, and demonstrations in universities and schools. More on the website
Three years later we found something similar in the central VDNKh pavilion: tables full of devices you could switch on and watch. But that is probably another story.
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