Beautiful Things · Pre-visit reading
Read together in class (or at home) before visiting the Beautiful Things exhibition. Every object named here is real — you'll stand in front of it soon.
Before electricity, everything at home took muscle: a spinning wheel for thread, washboards and hand-cranked washing machines for laundry, hand-cranked churns for butter, foot-powered sewing machines. Washday meant hauling the water, turning a heavy flywheel by hand, and feeding every piece through a roller wringer.
Look for: Wooden spinning wheel · Grouping of vintage washboards · Hand-crank washing machine and wringer · Wheeler & Wilson hand-crank sewing machine · Hand-crank butter churn
The phonograph let families hear music without a musician in the room: a needle rides the groove of a spinning disc, and a horn makes it loud — no electricity at all. Within twenty years the horn was hidden inside a tall wooden cabinet and the phonograph became furniture.
Look for: Victor III disc-horn phonograph · Modernola console gramophone · Victoria Talking Machine · Edison Ediphone dictation machine
Seattle's first telephone exchange opened in 1883 with ninety subscribers and one operator who had memorized every number. Over the next eighty years the telephone went from a crank box on the kitchen wall to a bright plastic dial phone — and never once had a screen.
Look for: Kellogg wall-mount telephone · Western Electric wall telephone · Candlestick rotary telephone · Desk telephones · Bell System rotary payphone · Rotary telephone collection
Radio brought news, music, and stories into the home instantly and for free. Families arranged living rooms around big wooden radios the way we arrange ours around screens — until radios shrank into bright plastic portables you could carry anywhere.
Look for: Raymond Loewy 'New World' globe radio · Atwater Kent cathedral radio · Zenith console radio · Zenith Trans-Oceanic portable shortwave · Sentinel red Bakelite portable radio
From magic-lantern slides on a bedsheet to a theater projector pulling film past a bright lamp, this is how pictures learned to move. Cheap box cameras like the Kodak Brownie meant ordinary families could finally photograph their own lives.
Look for: Vintage 5×7 and 8×10 photographs · Laterna Magica magic lantern set · Ampro Paramount 20 film projector · Paillard Bolex C8 movie camera · Kodak Brownie Hawkeye box camera · Drive-in theater speaker
Television stacked every earlier invention — recorded sound, broadcasting, moving pictures — into one glowing living-room box. Every family needed a rooftop antenna to pull the picture out of the air.
Look for: Early television in a wooden cabinet · Philco console television · Admiral Bakelite television · Rooftop television antennas
Before computers there were machines that could only add: pull the lever, and gears carried the ones. Then the Atari 2600 brought video games home and the Commodore VIC-20 put a computer on a family desk with less memory than one phone photo.
Look for: Pair of vintage mechanical calculators · Burroughs adding machine · Atari 2600 game console · Commodore VIC-20 personal computer
