A New Havel Motor brand pocket watch with black faceplate and radium painted numbers and clock hands. The watch case is made of plated metal and has a ridged winding mechanism at the top. "New Haven Motor" and "Radium" are printed in white lettering on the watch face.In the 1910s–1920s, radium was

Before the advent of radio and motion pictures, art and illustration were the primary forms of mass communication. With the outbreak of World War I, governments, militaries, and service organizations hired artists and illustrators to depict the ravages of war and to rally patriotism. Poster image

This Sony "Walkman" portable tape player dates from the early 1980s. Originally introduced in 1979 as the “Soundabout,” two people could listen simultaneously while a small microphone permitted them to converse without removing their headsets. Powered by a 9-volt battery, the recorder sold we

National Public Radio reporter Andy Carvin used this iPhone 3GS to monitor stories on Twitter during the Arab Spring movement in the winter of 2011. Twitter and social media became a large source of news during the movement as users on the ground in the Middle East relayed news and real-time even

The portability of cellular telephones provides users with the ability to make calls from almost anywhere and Motorola was built on portability. The company made car radios in the 1930s and portable radios called walkie-talkies for the U.S. military during World War Two, and played a major role i

Motorola produced this BPR 2000 model pager around 1982. Prior to the widespread availability of inexpensive cell phones many people carried telephone pagers to stay in contact with work or home. A miniature radio receiver, a pager alerted the user that someone needed to talk to them and provided

Before 1954, so-called portable radio receivers used vacuum tubes to receive and amplify signals. The large batteries needed to power most tubes made radios large and heavy. Receivers built with subminiature tubes existed but were expensive. The invention of transistors in 1947 allowed engineers

Motorola produced the DynaTAC cell phone in 1984 after more than a decade of work in cellular research and technology. The Motorola DynaTAC (an abbreviation of Dynamic Adaptive Total Area Coverage) was the first commercially available portable handheld cell phone. The phone was a 9-inches tall, w

Although we might think of fax machines as a relatively recent (if somewhat dated) technology, this episode uncovers the surprising history of the wireless fax machine. Host Tory Altman speaks with Hal Wallace, associate curator of the museum's electricity collection, about this 1930s device that

This robot was constructed in 1987 by Dr. Kenneth Kinzler and his colleagues at the Johns Hopkins Oncology Center's Molecular Genetics Lab run by Dr. Bert Vogelstein. It was used to conduct PCR in research on the p53 gene, which is linked to 50 percent of human cancers. Polymerase chain reaction,