MOAH's collections include everything from manual typewriters and adding machines to early radios, hand-cranked washing machines, and the tools of trades that have largely disappeared. The exhibits are tactile and comprehensible in a way that modern technology often is not: you can see how a gear train works, how a typewriter strikes ink onto paper, how an early telephone converted sound to electricity. In a region where the most consequential devices fit in your pocket and contain no visible moving parts, the museum's mechanical objects have a certain educational power.

The museum's location in Palo Alto gives it an unintentional thematic resonance. The city that hosts HP, Stanford, and hundreds of tech startups is also home to a collection that reminds visitors how recently the mechanical age ended. The gap between a hand-cranked calculator and a smartphone is less than a century -- a span of time that many of the museum's visitors can bridge through family memory. MOAH turns that proximity into its argument: understanding where technology came from helps us understand where it is going.