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Joe and I stopped at the American Museum of Radio and Electricity on our way to a weekend vacation in Vancouver, BC. The museum is located in Bellingham, WA and has an amazing collection of scientific instruments from the early days of electricity, more radios than you can imagine, a working radio station (internet stream available through Shoutcast), and a replica of the radio room on the Titanic.

I learned that Benjamin Franklin’s kite didn’t get hit by lightning. He observed the fibers on the kite string becoming charged. Later, as the wet string became more conductive, he captured some of that charge in a Leyden jar. The kite experiment helped Franklin prove that static electricity and lightning were similar in nature. (Georg Wilhelm Richmann of St. Petersburg, Russia wasn’t so lucky. Shortly after Franklin’s experiment, he was killed by ball lightning in the course of his own investigations and became the first person to die while conducting electrical experiments.)

While walking through the museum, we got to see the insides of an old electromechanical pinball machine being restored. It was fascinating! The wiring harness was expertly wrapped and the timing motors and switches made a great whirring/clicking sound (like Robbie the Robot in the 50’s movie Forbidden Planet.). It’s too bad that all those interesting guts were usually hidden inside the machine.

I had a great time and I’m looking forward to a return trip to the museum someday.