The Bay Area Radio Museum and Hall of Fame gathers 120 years of radio and TV history in one amazing historical building.
John Fink, an Alameda native, volunteers at the Bay Area Radio Museum in Alameda, Calif., on Saturday, March 2, 2024. – which happens to have once been the first telephone exchange on the island, circa 1900 – and you’ll find yourself plunged into an electronic wonderland of Inspector Gadget-type widgets and gizmos.
“Radio was the fastest-adopted technology ever — including the internet and cellphones and television,” says Rachel Lee, executive director of the California Historical Radio Society. “That’s probably my favorite factoid, because these days people are like ‘, radio.’ But it really was culture-changing – the ability to have this kind of news communication and entertainment was just huge in a time when you didn’t have widespread communication.
A collection of radios masquerading as a food and drink products is on display in the kitchen of the Bay Area Radio Museum in Alameda, Calif., Wednesday, March 6, 2024. “There were a bunch of engineers, mostly who worked in what we called the Electronic Gulch – before it was Silicon Valley – for companies likeand Ampex. These guys collected antique radios, and in 1974, they formed a group that was basically a radio collectors organization,” says Steve Cushman, former president and current director for the radio society. “They would meet in parking lots, and they would exchange radios and parts and schematics and books.
The oldest piece in the collection might be a 1900 oak-clad phone booth with a telephone that can still dial out. There is– one of the earlier wireless technologies, sometimes used on antisubmarine planes – and radio-station jackets from Bay Area personalities like KFOG’s Dave Morey and KOFY-TV’s Celeste Perry.with a tritone “bing-bing-bong” – a sound so distinctive, it got the first audio trademark in the country.
And you can actually buy radios here. Volunteers salvage old 1950s and ’60s-era radio boxes, clean them up and install Bluetooth connectivity, so you can listen to music wirelessly in your kitchen.
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