Another Exhibit

The U.S. could add one more exhibit this week to the evidence that Russia's educational system is backed by rare imagination and ingenuity. On view at the joint annual meeting of the American Physical Society and the American Association of Physics Teachers in Manhattan were 24 new gadgets to aid science teaching -a projector, voltage regulator, a machine for demonstrating wave motion, an optical splitter, an armillary sphere -all ingeniously designed for mass production and priced for sale in the U.S. at levels far below competing American models.

American scientists who have seen the aids call them excellent. Says Harvard's famed Physicist Gerald Holton: "Insofar as this material is new, it is striking, but it also represents another thing: that the Russians have expended precious technical thought on scientific educational equipment." The U.S. makes nothing like the classroom wave-motion machine, and an American-made projector that costs Harvard $300 serves the purpose no better than a Russian model that costs $24.50 (plus 40% duty) delivered in New York. Adds Dr. Albert Navez, whose high school program in Newton, Mass, last year turned out both winners of the Westinghouse Science Talent Search (TIME, March 17): "It's a little bit fantastic, after we've been told their equipment is so rudimentary, to find this remarkable stuff."

Importer for the gadgets is Cambridge Businessman Paul Grindle, whose Ealing Corp. sells foreign educational equipment to the U.S. market. Grindle saw some of the machines on the cover of a Russian physics magazine, went to Moscow and began negotiations. The gadgets are good, says Grindle, because they are designed by clever engineers specifically for teaching, cheap because they are already in mass production for Russian schools.

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