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In the early 1980s, Boston College Chemistry Professor T. Ross Kelly was passing a newspaper stand in Italy when an unusual hat caught his eye. It appeared to have a ball levitating above it, thanks to a built-in air jet. Kelly was fascinated by the hat鈥檚 mechanics, so he bought it鈥攖he first purchase in what would become his 鈥淐uriosity Cabinet,鈥� an extensive collection of objects that demonstrate scientific principles or seem to defy logic. During the latter half of his five-decade teaching career at BC, he amassed around 100 gizmos and toys in his office in the Merkert Chemistry Center. Some of them Kelly even built himself, such as a hairspray-powered potato cannon fashioned from a PVC pipe. (He fired it off the roof of the Beacon Street parking garage into Alumni Stadium.)

In 2014, Kelly digitized the collection. Two undergraduate students filmed him demonstrating dozens of his gadgets and uploaded the footage to YouTube. Last spring, one of the videos, depicting gravitational illusions, went viral. It has been viewed more than 27 million times, and several other videos on have been watched hundreds of thousands of times. Kelly may have retired from BC in 2019, but he remains on the hunt for new curiosities. 鈥淚鈥檓 always looking, because once you have it, the fun part鈥檚 over,鈥� he said. 鈥淓xcept when you鈥檙e sharing it with somebody.鈥�