Family Events 2026
The Family Day is back at Kirkwall Grammar School with a wonderful mix of activities – including the return of the planetarium! We will have more news soon.
We also welcome back Johnathan Doran and P:aul Beaomont from SSERC with a show full of light and colour – it’s called Things that Glow in the Dark.
And there is the story of a remarkable man who developed the gramophone for the mass market – with video accompaniment plus a wind-up gramophone to play some classic old records.
Fireflies and glow-worms do it ... and also some algae. Laundry detergents, sugar - even envelopes and sellotape - can glow too. How does this come about? And how can we see it in action? Johnathan Doran and Dr Paul Beaumont from SSERC turn down the lights for a family show packed with live demonstrations designed to spark curiosity about how, and why, so many unexpected things glow in the dark.
Visit the planetarium. Become a dark matter detective. Help to build Microbe City. Make a photo from sunlight. Make a marine monster. Learn about the life of the shore., and the underworld world of divers. Learn about the life of the soil. Meet the zebrafish. Track where the heat goes in a house. And much much more!
A multimedia one-man show developed by musician and composer Christopher Andrew Maier on the history of the wind-up gramophone and the life of its inventor, Eldridge Reeves Johnson. Labelled at school “too goddamned dumb” for college and put to work in a Philadelphia machine shop, he developed it into a company known worldwide as Victor Talking Machine. He turned the hand-cranked Berliner Gramophone into a spring-driven mass-market product and produced 78 rpm shellac records, with the little dog’s picture, listening to ‘His Master’s Voice’. The show has a seamless video musical backcloth and includes a working 1907 gramophone with vintage discs, from Caruso to the Charleston.
