Teaching science with a big `poof!'

A few hours after receiving the Council for Elementary Science International's Science Advocate Award and a standing ovation from 1,000 science teachers in 2000, Don Herbert was asked to pull a water balloon into a bottle. He used one of his old tricks. As a science educator, he knew them all. And as Mr. Wizard, he'd shown them to the world.

Mr. Wizard was television's original science teacher, the first guy to use television to teach. His relaxed manner and the quality of his demonstrations made him a household name. David Letterman had him on his first show, because Letterman grew up with "Watch Mr. Wizard." Herbert's techniques and performances helped create the United States' first generation of homegrown rocket scientists just in time to respond to Sputnik. He sent us to the moon. He changed the world.

When you watched Mr. Wizard, it was as if you were visiting him at home. At the start of each show, a kid just like you would stop by his house and, together, the three of you (it felt as if you were right there with him) would go through a series of household science demonstrations. Looking back, these might seem simple, but they were elegant. Their apparent simplicity rendered them all the more compelling -- we all just had to see what happened.

Mr. Wizard stood eggs on end, hammered nails with cryogenic bananas and graphed shrinking gases on their way to absolute zero long before anyone else did. He threw a switch and the bathroom lights came on, but so did the bathtub spigot. Wow, water and electricity can safely mix -- if you know the science behind them. It was all fun, because it was all fascinating.

Young people today might never have heard of Mr. Wizard except in a passing reference by the band Smash Mouth. Well, he's the no hocus-pocus close-up guy they were talking about. If you're not hip, you might as well be walking on the sun. (Not possible -- astronomical science.)

If you think about it, your favorite and most influential teachers were or are performers. When they get up in front of the class, they've got something to say, and they present with style, the way a comedian delivers material. So did low-key Don, who died Tuesday at his home in Bell Canyon at age 89.