It can be easy to forget when almost every electronic item we buy comes from some giant factory overseas, but some of the earliest consumer electronics hardware was not only hand-made but could also be made at home.
Some of the gadget business’s analog beginnings are on display at a museum tucked into a 1906 house in the D.C. suburb of Bowie, Maryland, that is itself easy to overlook next to the much bigger museums lining the National Mall.
The National Capital Radio & Television Museum isn’t free (admission is $7 for most, $5 for seniors, students, and Bowie residents) and is open only on Fridays, Saturdays, or Sundays. But it delivers an unusual focus on the history of wireless entertainment in the years before that phrase meant streaming media.
Eat Your Oats
Start with the lineup of crystal radios—simple, no-electricity-needed AM receivers that could be built from kits—in the room featuring some of the museum’s oldest hardware, besides a snippet of an 1858 transatlantic telegraph cable.
The most noticeable crystal radio on display looks like an empty cardboard Quaker Oats canister because it was built from one, with the tuning coil strung along the outside. A label explains that starting in 1921, Quaker sent out some 250,000 radio add-on kits to people who mailed in $1 and the label from a past Quaker purchase.
Eat now, listen later: Quaker Oats saw fit to encourage radio listenership by mailing crystal-radio kits. (Credit: Rob Pegoraro)
Steps away, a 1940 Philmore VC-1000 crystal radio was set up and available for a listen. I can’t tell you what talk-radio station I heard because I didn’t recognize any of the voices, and because crystal radios have no user interface understandable to a 21st-century listener.
Radios look less like lab projects as the exhibits move into the 1930s. Speaker covers painted with wildlife scenes evoke the same blend-into-the-decor approach behind art-gallery TVs like Samsung’s The Frame, while the elaborate wood frames for loop antennas evoke the rigging of sailing ships.
“People were making this part of their lives,” explained Gary Arlen, a longtime industry analyst who was one of my favorite people to see at CES and who now works as a docent and director at the museum.
You thought your wireless router’s antennas stood out in the living room? (Credit: Rob Pegoraro)
The advent of vacuum tubes allowed for tabletop-sized radios and design experiments, which are shown off in the museum’s collection. For example, a 1935 Art Deco-styled Pla-Pal model reveals a flip-out compartment on each side, one for shot glasses and the other for small bottles of liquor, while a floor-standing Philco “radio bar” doubles as a regulation-sized liquor cabinet.
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Samples of broadcasts from that era available for a listen in this room—including one of Adolf Hitler leading a Nazi rally and another of the Hindenburg disaster—provide a reminder of what could have driven listeners to drink back then.
A much larger radio looks more like a printer because it is: The Crosley Model 118 Reado was part of a 1939 experiment in transmitting newspapers overnight by radio to be printed out in the morning. You can think of that as an extremely early prototype of push technology.
Newspapers were wrestling with distribution possibilities unlocked by technology long before the 1990s. (Credit: Rob Pegoraro)
You Ought to Be in Pictures
A separate room shows how TV began to creep into the market; the oldest hardware on display is a 1931 mechanical spinning-disc TV, sold as a $12.95 kit, that projected a minimum-resolution image at a frame rate that evokes e-ink tablets.
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The museum’s small collection of TV sets offers an expedited tour of progress from the tiny, bulbous black-and-white cathode-ray tube sets of the early postwar years to the mid-century-modern style of a 1959 Philco Predicta, which had its relatively shallow, 17-inch black-and-white tube mounted above the cabinet that housed the rest of its hardware.
If you ever had a 2002 iMac on your desk, the design of this 1959 set may seem slightly familiar. (Credit: Rob Pegoraro)
Color TVs, however, don’t get much representation in this room after 1954 RCA and Motorola sets; Arland noted that the museum has a warehouse’s worth of hardware that they can’t fit in its confined space.
The most recent hardware on display here is all portable, such as a 1984 Sony FD-20A Watchman that squeezed a CRT into pocketable dimensions. There’s also a case showing novelty transistor radios designed to look like real-world products, such as a Tropicana orange and a pack of Marlboro cigarettes. That last one has not aged well, but neither has the 2003-vintage portable XM satellite radio receiver on display in the same room.
The exhibits here also include the occasional nod to DC’s history in radio and TV, such as the microphone used to interview the Beatles on the local AM station WWDC during their first US visit in 1964.
As at any museum, you exit through the gift shop. But here that shop takes the form of a wall of restored vintage radios for sale–for example, a 1945 RCA Q32 AM/shortware receiver in a handsome polished-wood housing, offered for $144.95 with a three-month warranty. Arlen said the museum’s volunteers occasionally modify one of these sets to add Bluetooth audio, so electronics collectors should be aware that a visit here could wind up costing them a lot more than $7.
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