The broadcast area is the largest collection at the museum.  Many of the radios are restored and operational and tuned to our local studio that plays music from the 20's to the 60's.

The TV gallery is being worked on, so it will have working sets, even though we don't have our own television studio (yet?).

RADIOS:

Here are six views that give an idea of the extent of SPARC's collection.

1.         2.<----         3.

PICTURE 1 shows an "island" of floor models, topped by both "cathedral" and "tombstone" table sets. PICTURE 2 is a display case that greets visitors at the entrance. Notice the grandfather-clock-style of radio; the maker of the clock (see detail) is Hammond, the same Hammond that invented the Hammond organ about 1935. Laurens Hammond was an inventor and producer of electric clocks before that -- no wonder the Hammond organ is full of gears and needs to be oiled yearly! PICTURE 3 shows an area that has grown since this picture was taken. Can you spot two wind-up phonographs? No electronics at all.

PICTURES 5, 6, and 7: how many ways can you say "radio"? These pictures have a number of examples of TRF (tuned radio frequency) sets, which usually have three large knobs, each of which had to be tuned to the station's frequency, unlike later "superhetrodyne" radios that had only one knob to tune to the desired frequency. Additional knobs on old radios were adjusted to keep the tube filaments glowing at the right temperature as the batteries aged. This was not the day of set-it-and-forget-it. Owners of these early sets listened on headphones, or "trumpet" loudspeakers, seen in all three views.

TVs:

The TV gallery has been re-arranged to better present many new items added over the last while. In these partial views, you can see some early round-screen sets, a "newish" TV for a contrast, and some large floor models in handsome cabinets meant to be the center-piece of a 1950s living room -- they had quality in their sound systems that somehow disappeared until the more recent interest in "home-theatre"!

In the first picture, take special note of the large floor-model at the lower left -- it is one of RCA's first production colour television sets (model CT-100, The "Merrill"). At $1000 in 1954, not many were sold - the screen was smaller than black and white sets of the time, and there were few hours of colour programming. Only 90 of these sets are known to exist world-wide.

In the second picture, there are a number of table models that have round picture tubes. Even though the picture that is transmitted is rectangular, manufacturers in the late 40s were not yet producing rectangular picture tubes, so the image was presented either with the corners missing, or with black areas surrounding the complete scene. With the appearance of DVDs and HDTV, now we're facing similar issues 60 years later!

In this gallery, we are working toward having some sets displaying the "indian-head" test pattern, and perhaps some classic "I Love Lucy" or other TV re-runs.

As this page develops, we want it to contain an in-depth look at selected receivers.