Beautiful Things · Student explorer
Every one of these is a real thing you can see at the exhibition. Tap any object to read its story, see more photos, and watch its film if it has one.
Period 1 · 1850s–1890s
Before electricity, everything at home took muscle: 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.
Period 2 · 1900s–1910s
The phonograph let families hear music without a musician in the room: a needle rides the groove of a spinning disc, and a big metal horn makes it loud — no electricity at all. Early telephones sent voices down wires for the first time.
Period 3 · 1920s–1940s
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.
Period 4 · 1920s–1950s
Film turned pictures into moving stories: cameras caught the images, and theater projectors pulled film past a bright lamp fast enough to trick your eyes. Cheap box cameras like the Kodak Brownie meant ordinary families could finally photograph their own lives.
Period 5 · 1950s
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.
Period 6 · 1980s
The Atari 2600 brought video games home, and the Commodore VIC-20 was one of the first computers a family could afford — with less memory than one phone photo today. The world you live in starts here, a few steps from the spinning wheel.
