The American Museum of Radio and Electricity is the creation of its two founders, Jonathan Winter and John Jenkins. Both have been collectors for four decades. Their knowledge, experience, and philosophy regarding scientific exploration and educational possibilities inform both the purpose and the operations of the Museum.

From Jonathan Winter:
I was born in Santa Barbara, California, in 1943, when radio ruled the airwaves. Some of my earliest memories are of listening to Sergeant Preston of the Yukon, the Cisco Kid, the Lone Ranger, Amos ‘n’ Andy, Red Skelton, and the habitués of Allen’s Alley. I loved the voices and the stories and the many kinds of music that came out of the “magic box.”

The beauty of radios—the wonderful materials, beautiful tubes, and all the other intriguing parts—also captivated me. I can remember the seemingly endless hours I spent taking old abandoned sets apart and using the pieces to build models of spaceships and devices to communicate with distant planets. My imagination was fired up by the possibilities.

Soon I wanted to know how radios worked. Sometimes I could manipulate the wires and parts and bring a broken-down, discarded receiver back to life. These activities fed my inquiring mind, brought me wonderful words of praise from my elders, and put me in touch with a series of unforgettable mentors who liked to tinker, too. I felt empowered, and I wanted to learn more. I was hooked.

By the time I was twelve I must have had ten or fifteen old battery radios in various stages of repair. Over the years I accumulated more of them, along with parts and manuals and radio accessories. Most of this growing collection remained in storage while I went on with my life, attending several colleges and succeeding at different trades, from making fine jewelry to building satellite dishes. Always my vocations involved creating beautiful and useful things, and always I was motivated by the desire to learn more. Knowledge of what makes things work, how and why objects do what they do, continues to be important to me, and I’ve acquired it through several different kinds of education, much of it provided by life.

Finally I settled in Bellingham and was able to bring my collection of radios and related paraphernalia out of storage. More than 1,000 objects illustrate the history of radio from the first crystal sets to the largest and most sophisticated receivers of the Golden Age. I have collected static electricity machines and early phonographs, as well as many examples of radio broadcasting technology. There are rare tubes of great beauty, speakers, microphones, and thousands of books, magazines, technical manuals, Edison cylinders, 78 rpm records, and recordings of popular radio programs.

I shared this collection with others through what was first known as the Bellingham Antique Radio Museum and now has become—with the addition of John Jenkins’ collection—the American Museum of Radio and Electricity.

From John Jenkins:

I was born in 1953 in Bellingham, Washington. I joined Hewlett-Packard as an engineer in 1974 and held various technical and sales positions there during the next twelve years. In 1986 I moved to Microsoft, where I worked for fifteen years, most recently as General Manager of worldwide OEM sales and marketing. I retired from Microsoft in February 2001.

My interest in electricity started when I was very young. My father was an industrial electrician and with two older brothers, I was “exposed” to electricity projects and experiments from the time I was in diapers. Those projects quickly switched to radio when I discovered my great-uncle’s long-abandoned radio correspondence course gathering dust in the basement. Before long, I was making weekly trips to the local dump to find discarded radios that I could either repair or cannibalize for parts. When I was thirteen, I built a local telephone network to connect the houses of my friends, using modified table radios as amplifiers. By that time I also had a small neighborhood radio repair business, operating it from that same dusty corner of my parents’ basement.

About that time, I discovered a 1927 radio stored in my grandmother’s home. I got it to work and from that moment, I was hooked on antique radios and other interesting objects related to the history of electricity. During the next 40 years, I collected more than 1,500 pieces that depict the scientific exploration of electricity from 1600 forward, as well as the early years of radio. There are many artifacts from the laboratories of the early pioneers of electricity, plus rare radios, speakers, and related apparatus from the beginnings of the broadcast era. Among the most exciting components of my collection are original books and scientific papers that chronicle crucial milestones in the development of radio and electricity, by authors such as Gilbert, Galileo, Benjamin Franklin, Volta, Hertz, and Marconi.

Visit John Jenkins’ personal website at sparkmuseum.com.