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Plaque commemorating Exploratorium Founder Frank Oppenheimer, next to a picture of him sitting at a desk wearing a suit and tie. The text on the plaque reads: When he came to San Francisco in the 1960s, Exploratorium founder Dr. Frank Oppenheimer had already had three life-shaping careers. A brilliant physicist in his own right, he'd been a university professor and worked beside his brother, J. Robert Oppenheimer (aka the "father" of the atomic bomb), on the Manhattan Project in the 1940s. Barred from scientific research in the 1950s, Frank became a cattle rancher and high school science teacher. But rather than relying on textbooks, he filled his classroom with the real stuff of science, from tinkerer's tools to junkyard parts- hands-on approach that became his trademark and ultimately led him to create the Exoloratorum. Frank's goal was to give people the props they needed to experience how the world worked. He wanted them to realize they could understand science and therefore feel empowered to participate in the social and political discussions of the time. In 1969, he created a new kind of museum-a place he called an "exploratorium." Frank served as the museum's director until just before his death in 1985. In 2013, the Exploratorium moved here from its original home at San Francisco's iconic Palace of Fine Arts.