[This is one section of the article, "Behind the Scenes in Arts and Sciences."]

John Davis also provides materials that allow students to observe natural phemonena. But instead of algae and fungi, he uses air tracks, bicycle wheels, spring scales, tuning forks, magnets, prisms, and other assorted objects.

Davis is a lecture demonstrator for the Department of Physics. He coordinates, installs, and dismantles apparatus used in physics classes to demonstrate everything from uniform velocity to nuclear magnetic resonance. And he maintains the department’s extensive—and somewhat unwieldy—collection of nearly 1,000 demonstrations.

John Davis shows one of his demonstrations, a concave mirror that creates a “real” image in 3-D rather than the virtual image seen with a flat mirror. Photo by Mary Levin.

“Some people refer to my storage area as the ‘toy room,’” says Davis. “But everything in here is a teaching tool to demonstrate nature in action.”

Consider Davis’s personal favorite, the Toepler-Holtz electrostatic generator. It’s the oldest piece of equipment in the collection—dating back to 1892—but it still grabs students’ attention as it creates a high level of charge through static electricity. “It can jump a spark seven or eight inches on a dry day,” says Davis. “When it goes off, students typically jump in their seats. Students love it so much. You drag out this ancient piece of equipment and it charges up the room—in more than one way.”

Physics faculty typically use four or five such demonstrations in class on any given day. Davis and assistant Gavin Fulmer are responsible for setting up all the equipment—sometimes for several faculty in several lecture halls simultaneously—in the ten minutes between classes.

“It’s like being a stage manager for a big blowout production,” Davis jokes. “Everything has to work perfectly, and on time. At times it can be a high stress job. I guess I must be an adrenaline junky in my own way.”

Although suited to the job, Davis entered the field of lecture demonstrations through the back door. He was pursuing a master’s degree in physics at Kansas State University when his department asked him to fill in for a lecture demonstrator who had left on short notice. “I figured it could provide income while I took classes,” he recalls.

	Bicycle wheels are among the common objects used to demonstrate natural phenomena. Photo by Mary Levin.

Four years later, a National Science Foundation course about lecture demonstrations enabled Davis to see “how powerful lecture demonstrations can be as a teaching tool,” he says. “That’s when my job became a career.” He continued working at Kansas State for another seven years, then switched to the UW in 1979.

The teaching aspect of the job still motivates Davis, who once considered becoming a physics teacher. “I see my job as a way to teach behind the scenes,” he says. “It’s the best of all worlds, really, since I get to help with a lot of positive teaching, but I don’t have to grade papers.

“When students can see a phenomenon through a demonstration, it seems to etch a sector in their memory banks,” says Davis. “I’ve met people who can describe phenomena they had seen 30 years earlier in a demonstration. The demonstrations make a long-term impact.”

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