The SPARK Museum, Four Centuries of Electricity in a Downtown Storefront
Near Bellingham, Washington
There is a museum on Cornwall Avenue in downtown Bellingham dedicated to the history of electricity, radio, and the technology that connected the modern world. The SPARK Museum of Electrical Invention, formerly called the American Museum of Radio and Electricity, holds a collection spanning from fifteen eighty to the nineteen fifties: four centuries of human invention compressed into twenty-three thousand square feet on the ground floor of a downtown building. The collection began in nineteen eighty-five as the personal accumulation of a Bellingham resident named Jonathan Winter, who had been collecting radio sets, spare parts, schematics, recordings, and vintage magazines for years.
By nineteen ninety-eight, his collection had grown to more than eight hundred radio sets, and he formalized it as the Bellingham Antique Radio Museum. In two thousand and one, a former Microsoft sales executive named John Jenkins retired to Bellingham and donated his own collection to the institution. Jenkins's additions included early wireless and electrical devices, and a library of rare scientific books with first editions dating to fifteen sixty, written by figures like Benjamin Franklin, Michael Faraday, Alessandro Volta, Heinrich Hertz, and William Gilbert.
Among the notable exhibits: a reproduction of the radio room of the Titanic, complete with original Marconi wireless apparatus. A working nineteen twenty-nine Theremin. One of the largest collections of nineteenth-century electromagnetic apparatus in the country.
A complete set of Atwater Kent breadboard radios. A working Tesla coil eight feet tall capable of generating four million volts. The museum runs a public electrical demonstration show during which the Tesla coil fires in a darkened room, which is either educational theater or educational theater of the first order, depending on your relationship to high voltage.
It is, in the best sense, a private obsession that became a public institution, exactly the kind of place that would not survive a real estate market and barely survives this one.
