Description of the attraction
The Power Plant Museum is the main division of the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences in Sydney. Another branch of the museum is the Sydney Observatory. Despite the fact that this museum is often described as a scientific one, in its depths there are very diverse collections, among which one can single out "Applied Arts", "Science", "Communications", "Transport", "Media", "Computer Technologies", "Space Technologies", "Steam Engines", etc.
In various versions, the Power Plant Museum has existed for more than 125 years, it contains about 400 thousand exhibits. Most of them are located in the building that the museum occupied in 1988 and from which it got its name. It used to be a substation for electric trams, but today it is a popular tourist attraction in Sydney.
The history of the museum dates back to the Sydney International Exhibition, held in 1879, some of the exhibits of which formed the basis of the technological museum. For some time, the collections were housed in the Sydney Hospital in the same room as the morgue, and in 1893 the museum moved to its own building, where it was located until 1988.
Today, among the exhibits of the museum, you can see unique things - for example, the world's oldest operating steam engine, created in 1785, and the first steam locomotive, built in New South Wales in 1854. And, perhaps, the most popular exposition of the museum is the model of the "Strasbourg Clock", built in 1887 by a 25-year-old watchmaker from Sydney, Richard Smith. This is a working model of the famous Strasbourg Astronomical Clock. Smith himself never saw the original, and he created his model from a brochure describing the timekeeping and astronomical functions of the watch. The "Space Technologies" exposition presents a life-size model of the space shuttle cockpit. Children are especially fond of the "Experiments" exposition, where, with the help of interactive displays, one can get acquainted with various aspects of magnetism, electricity, light, movement, etc. For example, here you can learn how chocolate is made and taste it at each of the four stages of making.
