20th Century Technology Museum

03/19/2026

We had a delightful group from the Hardy Community Center in Harris County come tour the museum today. Thank you for the visit. You were all such a pleasure to have!

02/10/2026

Great tour today…30 high school seniors

11/17/2025

A lot has changed since this was written in 2006, but we are still dedicated to preserving 20th century technology. Come reminisce, remember, or discover for the first time with us!

Today, we remember what we'd forgotten. The University of Houston's College of Engineering presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them. Yesterday, we went to see the new Museum of 20th-Century Technology down in Wharton, Texas.....

05/22/2023

The book, “Open Circuits” by Eric Schlaepfer and Windell H. Oskay, shows the inner beauty of electronic components.

01/09/2023

Oh, the games we played!
Check out our temporary display on 20th century games.

12/04/2021

How they placed the VariEze on the pole!
Thanks to Henry Jetelina for restoring it and to Barbee Services for putting it there!

12/01/2021

Utah! 🔊📻🔈 This very early radio speaker from 1925 comes from the Utah Radio Products Co., founded in Salt Lake City just a few years before. In the 1920s, radio was in its infancy and the cantankerous radio sets had to be wired not only to large antennas but also to external speakers like this one.

It's always fun to try to trace these early companies forward to see what became of them, and while the history of Utah Radio Products isn't well-documented, it seems to have moved to Chicago in 1930 and to Indiana a little while later, and sold speakers under the Utah brand (as an OEM to companies like Fender and at retail outlets such as Radio Shack) until the early 1970s. At that point, a member of the Pyle family that founded Utah speakers went on to form Pyle Speakers, which remains in business today, selling speakers (among other things).

In front of the speaker are, of course, small metal models of Nipper, the RCA dog. Nipper deserves his own post with his 123 year (and counting!) history...

11/27/2021

A few Model A Car Club members braved the cold and rainy weather to tour the museum today. 🌧 They don’t have heaters and the windshields leak!

11/01/2021

Honey Bee! 🍯🐝✈️ Right at the top of the list of 20th century inventions has to be the airplane, and here we have one from the golden age of homebuilt and experimental aircraft, the Beecraft Honey Bee from 1952.

The Honey Bee was the brainchild of San Diego aeronautical engineer Walter Mooney, built as a larger follow-up to Beecraft's first plane, the Wee Bee (which had no cockpit, you just strapped yourself to the fuselage--seriously). Only a few Honey Bees were built, possibly as few as three. Our Honey Bee is serial number 2. (Serial number 1 is in the collection of .) Note that the wing is currently off of ours for easier storage; it doubles as the roof of the cockpit.

At present we have no way to display large items such as this Honey Bee at the museum itself, so it is in storage at a nearby airport awaiting improvements that will allow us to properly preserve and display it.

09/28/2021

"Red eye" 🟥👁🪡 The Singer 66 sewing machine is practically synonymous with the 20th century... it was made for over 50 years starting in 1902 and surely many are still in use today. This model is known as the "red eye" for the elaborate pattern of, uh, red eye shapes decorating it.

The Singer 66 was probably the best mass-produced sewing machine of its era (or possibly of *any* era) and was priced to match. Singer even provided financing with terms of up to 20 *years*. That's right, 20 YEARS.

09/16/2021

Beetle update 🚗🪲🇩🇪 A while back we told you about Günther, our 1973 Volkswagen Super Beetle convertible that we planned to restore. Here's the story so far:

We cleaned him up and ordered a bunch of parts to get his old air-cooled engine running, which we eventually were able to do, if not without drama, blood, sweat, tears, etc. Eventually we reached the limits of our capabilities and towed him to a shop to have them look at the stuck transmission and a few other things... and that's where the story takes a turn for the worse.

Apparently, poor Günther's frame is in bad shape, probably in no small part because of floating away during Hurricane Harvey and so on. So it's not in the cards for him to be out running back on the road again, at least not with our current resources.

So for those of you who've read this far, what should we do? Appeal to to help get him fixed up an on the road? Drain his fluids and park him in the museum where you can sit in him, but not feel the wind in your hair driving him down the road? (Run a fan to simulate the wind?) Or sell him off and buy something else for the collection?

You know, we originally decided not to include cars in our collection (and we still do not have any on display) because when we opened the museum there were many excellent car museums around, including at least three within a couple hundred miles of us. (And also: cars are large and expensive.) But now, all three of those nearby museums have closed, so we may need to reconsider...