Wondergy · Our Story
Twenty-three years of turning curiosity into light — from buckets on a New York street to a festival of laser light.
It started with the things we do every day.
On the streets of New York, two Columbia students kept noticing the same thing: people stopped to ask how cool things worked. They wondered. They smiled. Something became obvious — people are curious.
So in 2003, Ken Fink and Rebecca Machalow began to grow a business of feeding that curiosity. It launched, fittingly, as the party division of a company called Whatergy — the original pitch was "imagine Bozo the Clown, PhD." Science and fun, they were certain, belong together.
B.A. in Physics from Columbia, then the marketing program at Wharton. Ken has developed and presented hundreds of high-energy demonstrations — for schools, museums, Broadway and network television, and physics labs from Japan to the Mid-Atlantic — reaching millions of learners along the way. He TIG-welded the eight-foot menorah himself and programmed the five-laser show that lights it.
A keynote regular, too — his bio promises that "between blowing stuff up and setting himself on fire, audiences will laugh and learn together."
A Barnard graduate with a combined major in Biology and Computer Science — "think Human Genome Project." Rebecca taught everyone from Harlem middle-schoolers to Columbia grad students, "bringing excitement and creativity to even the deadliest classrooms," and went on to author K-12 science curricula adopted by school districts nationwide.
No photograph of Rebecca survives in our archive — so we won't invent one. Her fingerprints are all over the way Wondergy teaches: less vocabulary, more understanding.
You have taken complex concepts and brought them down — without dumbing them down.
That's the compliment we're proudest of. It came from a Lockheed Martin electrical engineer, watching a Wondergy show. Smart, never dumbed-down. That's the whole job.
Before the lasers became the whole show, Wondergy ran a whole circus of science. These aren't on the calendar anymore — they're the heart of how we learned to make a room gasp. A look back at a few favorites.
A pro skater threw down real tricks while we unpacked the forces behind them — center of mass, inertia, the way safety gear spreads a wallop over time and area. Sick moves, the occasional magic trick, and plenty of the audience's own insight.
The finale was the stuff of school legend: a skater would lie on a bed of nails while another launched clean over the top — a force-distribution lesson nobody ever forgot.
"A highlight for our kids was when our principal volunteered to have one of the skateboarders jump over him while he was lying on a bed of nails." Marissa Pelligrino · Hopewell Elementary
Liquid nitrogen is the coolest stuff around — about 320 degrees below zero. We used it to freeze flowers solid, shatter them like glass, and (outdoors only, obviously) launch an everyday trash can a clean fifty feet into the air. One camp told us it beat their fireworks.
A beloved special-events tradition with a long, happy track record: cream, sugar and a cloud of liquid nitrogen, whipped into fresh ice cream in seconds while the audience watches. It's not on the menu right now — but it's a returning favorite, and it's on its way back. Watch this space.
We built from a single hovering quadcopter all the way up to a coordinated, dancing drone swarm — Newton's laws, torque, sensors and fast feedback loops, made visible in the air over the audience. (When a draft sent one tumbling, the kids cheered louder. We suspect they liked the crashes anyway.)
Sound as you've never seen it. Ken built a four-foot Ruben's tube — a pipe of flame that draws standing sound waves in fire — and a laser oscilloscope from an Arduino and analog circuitry, so your own voice became a dancing thread of light. Vibrations, frequency, resonance: all of it, lit up.
From simple, funny machines to a state-of-the-art NAO humanoid that danced, played soccer, and gave hugs — a tour through how a robot senses, decides, and moves, and the one trick they're uniquely good at: self-correcting, so they don't fall over. The kids always hugged it back.
So we took them everywhere. Wondergy crisscrossed the country in hybrid hatchbacks — leading by example, saving thousands of gallons of fuel — and once flew halfway around the world for a forty-show tour across southern India, dissecting evaporative coolers in the heat as live science. We've played for the Philadelphia Phillies and for the engineers at Lockheed Martin. We co-wrote Philadelphia's physical-science curriculum. And in a good year, we visited three hundred-plus schools.
For the Phillies, we explained how Penn's Landing freezes a parking lot into an ice rink — on one of the hottest days of the year. For early-childhood educators, we proved that the laser-show fog only makes you cough once the lights come on. The science was always real; the wonder was the point.
Today we're focusing on what started it all — light.
The Festival of Laser Light is the one show open for booking — a Hanukkah spectacle of laser, music and many-colored flame. And the beloved favorites? They're not gone. Liquid Nitrogen Ice Cream and the rest are coming back soon. Curiosity has a way of returning.