Manchester’s Magiscope: An Interesting Optics Puzzle

• Rachael Lancor ^[1] ; Brian Lancor ^[1]
  1. [1] Edgewood College

     Edgewood College

     City of Madison, Estados Unidos

     
• Localización: The Physics Teacher, ISSN 0031-921X, Vol. 55, Nº. 2, 2017, págs. 106-108
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • The Magiscope was an attraction at Manchester’s department store in Madison, WI, in 1939 that allowed children to peek into Santa’s workshop (as shown in Fig. 1). The “magiscope” was a telescope-like device that gave children the illusion they were looking at a distant Santa, when in fact they were looking at a fabricated workshop on an upper level of the department store. In this article, we describe how we used the puzzle of the magiscope as a final assessment for our optics unit in an introductory physics course.