Please Touch Everything (A History of the Ontario Science Centre)

The story of the revolutionary Ontario Science Centre, its iconic exhibits, and the people who made it all happen.

A Centennial project announced by Premier John Robarts in 1964, the Ontario Science Centre upended the traditional museum instruction — Don’t Touch — and created a whole new category of visitor attraction. Its designers, scientists, and craftspeople developed a way to explain science to the public by building mechanical devices for visitors to touch. Exhibits like the bicycle generator, and iconic demonstrations like the electricity show that made your hair stand on end, even those long escalators in that landmark building beside a Toronto ravine inspired generations of young people to pursue careers in science.

The Ontario Science Centre also changed the way that traditional museums and art galleries now interpret their collections to the public, and helped create an industry around this thing called interactivity. Its legacy is the contribution that it made to the public understanding of science. That work is even more remarkable when you consider that it was created inside a government institution, under a cloud of senior managers of varying competencies, and politicians with changing agendas who closed its doors in the summer of 2024.