One of the most difficult decisions curators at the Indiana State Museum face is “do we collect this?” Rather than just considering items on an individual basis, curators Dale Ogden and Todd Stockwell have taken a more directed approach to the museum’s consumer electronics collection.
”When I first started here, the radio and television collection was stored under sheets of visqueen in the paint room,” says Ogden, Chief Curator of Cultural History. “We started to get RCA memorabilia in coincidentally. People would call in with items and we’d collect them. But we started receiving some pretty important items about a year ago and they made us start thinking about how we were going about this collection.”
Ogden and Stockwell decided to shift the collection focus from general collecting to consumer electronics that directly related and connected to Indiana history – and that meant RCA. The company has a long and significant history in Indiana. RCA began producing radios in the state in 1929 and even produced the world’s first commercial color television in 1954 in its Bloomington plant. That plant was one of the four in Indiana that made up the largest television manufacturing operation in the world at that time.
Among the recent acquisitions:
- A kit television from 1948 offered to the museum by a retired RCA engineer named William McCullough. The kit was one of only three that RCA offered to its employees outside of New Jersey and the one donated to the museum is the only one that survived. McCullough watched the first broadcast of the Indianapolis 500 on this set.
- A 1951 RCA CRT color picture tube prototype that Todd found on e-Bay. The tube, though made in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, is important to the collection because it pre-dates color television by three years and provides a background to the story of RCA’s development in Indiana.
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A 1957 color television donated by Jack House that had been given to his uncle, Carl Toedtmann, for his retirement from Delco Remy in Anderson. The television was manufactured in Bloomington at a time when there were virtually no color broadcasts.
- The first wide-screen TV produced by RCA donated by RCA engineer Richard Bourgerie.
- Seven prototype camcorders and video cameras from the late 1970s and early 1980s donated by RCA product designer Don O’Leary.
"Indiana was well known as a center for television manufacturing and RCA also did a lot of product development here. So, with retirees around the area offering us prototypes and pre-production examples of various consumer electronics, it makes sense for us to focus on collecting both the artifacts and the people stories behind them as great examples of Hoosier industry," says Stockwell, Curator of Agriculture, Industry and Technology.