Qualla: Museum of Radio and Technology https://qualla.com/museum-of-radio-and-technology en-us © 2026 Bendyline Wed, 08 Jul 2026 02:40:06 GMT Qualla serial false Qualla support@bendyline.com yes https://qualla.com/_m/d/n/v/6/museum-of-radio-and-technology-wp/hero-small.webp Qualla: Museum of Radio and Technology https://qualla.com/museum-of-radio-and-technology Museum of Radio and Technology: Introduction https://qualla.com/museum-of-radio-and-technology/ Photo credit Samz73428091, CC BY 4.0. The Gilbert Atomic Energy Lab was sold to American children between 1950 and 1951. It contained actual radioactive material - small samples of uranium ore - and was marketed as the educational toy of the atomic age. The Atomic Energy Lab was a commercial failure but a cultural icon, perfectly capturing the brief moment when Americans believed atomic energy was about to become a household technology like electricity or the radio. The Gilbert kit is on display at the Museum of Radio and Technology in Huntington, West Virginia, alongside Erector sets, chemistry kits, microscopes, and the rest of the Gilbert Company's mid-century educational product line. The museum opened in 1991 in the former Harveytown Elementary School, and it has been quietly accumulating American technological memory ever since.

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]]> Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/d/n/v/6/museum-of-radio-and-technology-wp/dnv6-museum-of-radio-and-technology-intro.mp3 0:06 1 full Museum of Radio and Technology: The 1920s Radio Shop https://qualla.com/museum-of-radio-and-technology/ Photo credit Samz73428091, CC BY 4.0. The museum's chronological tour begins with mechanical music reproduction in the pre-electrical era - phonographs, music boxes, and the cylinders and discs that played on them. Visitors then move into the wireless era, with a working crystal radio receiver and a rotary spark gap ...

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]]> Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/d/n/v/6/museum-of-radio-and-technology-wp/dnv6-museum-of-radio-and-technology-the-1920s-radio-shop.mp3 0:06 2 full Museum of Radio and Technology: The 1940s and 1950s Showroom https://qualla.com/museum-of-radio-and-technology/ Photo credit Samz73428091, CC BY 4.0. The 1940s and 1950s showroom recreates a typical radio and television store from the postwar consumer boom. Tube and transistor radios, television sets, wire and tape recorders, vintage turntables, and tuners line the walls. The Gilbert Company display includes Erector sets, chem...

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]]> Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/d/n/v/6/museum-of-radio-and-technology-wp/dnv6-museum-of-radio-and-technology-the-1940s-and-1950s-showroom.mp3 0:06 3 full Museum of Radio and Technology: Hams, Hallicrafters, and WV8MRT https://qualla.com/museum-of-radio-and-technology/ Photo credit Samz73428091, CC BY 4.0. The ham radio displays form one of the museum's strongest sections. Short-wave receivers and transmitters used by amateur operators across decades are organized around what museum staff call the Big H's - Hallicrafters, Hammarlund, Heath, and National (the latter included because...

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]]> Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/d/n/v/6/museum-of-radio-and-technology-wp/dnv6-museum-of-radio-and-technology-hams-hallicrafters-and-wv8mrt.mp3 0:06 4 full Museum of Radio and Technology: The 5,000-Watt Transmitter https://qualla.com/museum-of-radio-and-technology/ Photo credit Samz73428091, CC BY 4.0. The broadcasting room holds equipment from the heart of the twentieth-century broadcast industry. The centerpiece is a massive 5,000-watt AM transmitter from the 1930s - the kind of cabinet-sized apparatus that filled the technical rooms of major broadcast stations and made netwo...

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]]> Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/d/n/v/6/museum-of-radio-and-technology-wp/dnv6-museum-of-radio-and-technology-the-5-000-watt-transmitter.mp3 0:06 5 full Museum of Radio and Technology: The Harveytown School Memory https://qualla.com/museum-of-radio-and-technology/ Photo credit Samz73428091, CC BY 4.0. The museum building was Harveytown Elementary School from the 1920s through the 1970s. One section of the museum is dedicated to the children who sat in its classrooms across that fifty-year span - the local Harveytown history that the building itself carries. A computer display ...

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]]> Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/d/n/v/6/museum-of-radio-and-technology-wp/dnv6-museum-of-radio-and-technology-the-harveytown-school-memory.mp3 0:06 6 full