SPARK Museum: Four Centuries of Electricity in Bellingham
Near Bellingham, Washington
On Bay Street in downtown Bellingham sits one of the most unexpected museums in the Northwest. It started in nineteen eighty-five as a Bellingham resident's private hoard of antique radios, schematics, and vintage magazines. By nineteen ninety-eight, Jonathan Winter had turned it into the Bellingham Antique Radio Museum with more than eight hundred sets on display.
Then a former Microsoft executive named John Jenkins arrived with his own collection of early wireless devices and Edison-era electrical curiosities, and in two thousand one the combined collection became the American Museum of Radio and Electricity. In twenty twelve the museum rebranded as SPARK and added a giant Tesla coil called the MegaZapper that fires indoor lightning bolts during live demonstrations. Today the collection spans four centuries of invention, from early Edison light bulbs to early broadcast transmitters.
