Kaleidoscope Factory

[Abby Brown] This is a kaleidoscope.

(A long cylindrical tube.)

And if you hold it up to the light and look inside, you can see beautiful shapes and colors. And if I twist it, the colors and shapes change form and dance around. Pretty awesome, right? Here in Pocahontas, Iowa, there's a shop where you can learn all about this fascinating invention.

(Map marking Pocahontas County in west central Iowa.)

The kaleidoscope was invented by mistake when Sir David Brewster was using mirrors to study the properties of light.

Now, over 200 years later, the kaleidoscope factory in Pocahontas has turned this world famous toy into an art form.

These kaleidoscopes are handcrafted from wood right here in Iowa. They really are impressive pieces of art.

The materials that are put on the end of the kaleidoscope tube can be anything. Beads, little pieces of construction paper, popcorn, and even seashells.

Whatever the materials are, affects the images you see when you look through the kaleidoscope.

Leonard Olson came up with the idea for this small town Iowa shop after he received a kaleidoscope as a gift.

He taught himself how to make them, and soon orders were coming in from all over the world.

Sadly, Leonard passed away a few years ago, but his good friend, his sisters and brother-in-law wanted his legacy to continue. So they stepped in to run the business and even create other types of wooden items themselves.

(Two wooden trucks and several different types of wooden dinosaur toys.)

Sometimes visitors get to watch a real kaleidoscope crafted right here on location.

Let's watch Rich Hessenius, Leonard's brother-in-law, in action.

[Rich Hessenius] I've already drilled a hole in this block, and I'm going to turn this into a kaleidoscope egg.

(Rich uses a wood lathe — a tool that spins the block of wood quickly in a circle so he can move a hand chisel across the square horizontally to strip off sections of the square with each pass of the chisel to make the square piece of wood round.)

Now I'm going to sand it and make it smooth.

(As the lathe spins the round piece of wood, Rich holds up a square of sandpaper smoothing out the rough edges.)

I’m going to take some of the sawdust, and I'm going to hold it on there. And that kind of helps put oil back in the wood and it gets just a little bit smoother than the sandpaper.

This is my favorite part. That's when it makes it all shiny.

(Rich pours some liquid lacquer on a cloth and holds it up to the circular piece of wood as the lathe spins.)

That dries pretty quickly.

We have a kit that we can put inside this. This actually has the kaleidoscope in it. There's actually three mirrors in here, just like my other ones.

Slide it in here.

(Rich slides the kaleidoscope kit into the large end of the wooden egg.)

Screw this end in.

(Rich screws in the top of the kaleidoscope kit to the smaller opening of the wooden egg, tightening the kit into place.)

And there is your kaleidoscope egg.

[Abby] Just like the kaleidoscope, every county in Iowa has a new and creative view on our state. Thanks for enjoying this interesting combination of art and science with me here and Pocahontas County.

Funding for FIND Iowa has been provided by The Coons Foundation, Pella and the Gilchrist Foundation.