Broadcast Alert

Earl Bakken now makes his home in Hawaii, but on his periodic trips back to Minnesota, one regular stop is the Pavek Museum of Broadcasting. Housed in a modest building in St. Louis Park, the Pavek is “one of the best museums in the country on the [technological] history of radio and television,” Bakken says proudly.

The pride is due to the fact that Bakken, 84, cofounder of Medtronic Corporation and famous as the inventor of the first wearable cardiac pacemaker, is largely responsible for the Pavek’s opening in 1988. He stepped in to rescue from the basement of a Nicollet Avenue paint store the museum’s original stock of old radio receivers and other audio equipment amassed by a private collector named Joe Pavek. Having put himself through college at the University of Minnesota in part by repairing car radios, Bakken was an enthusiast. 

Pavek’s original collection has been added to ever since. The museum now is a gold mine for technology buffs—and an eye opener for everyone else, especially anyone who gets to stroll through the place with Bakken and Managing Director Stephen Raymer.

Who knew, for instance, that in the 1920s more than 60 Minnesota companies manufactured battery-powered AM radio receivers? Their boxy units are among the roughly 2,000 receivers in the Pavek’s collection. All but about two of the Minnesota companies went out of business shortly after the industry figured out in 1927 how to connect radios to AC current, Raymer says.

The 1912 model “rotary spark-gap transmitter,” similar to one aboard the Titanic, turns out to be a table-mounted apparatus about six feet long. When Raymer throws a couple of switches and taps out an SOS in Morse code, the flying sparks and humming and crackling from this baby recall the machinery in Frankenstein.

This chest-high box over here, with two metal aerial-like thingies sticking out of it, is a 1929 RCA theremin, one of only 200 ever built. It’s a musical device of sorts, played by waving one’s hands through the air near the aerials. Priced at $600 at the beginning of the Great Depression, theremins failed to sell briskly, but two of them later supplied the sound effects for the science-fiction classic The Day the Earth Stood Still.

The 1948 Ampex Model 200 tape recorder, one of the very machines used by Bing Crosby when he recorded his radio shows, is considerably larger than any reel-to-reel recorder a layman has seen. A 1927 acoustic phonograph, complete with automatic record changer, has no amplifier and relies instead on a long horn, curled like a tuba and hidden inside its substantial cabinet. Volume is controlled by opening and closing the cabinet doors.

Bakken, a longtime shortwave radio operator, contributed a few of his own receivers and other items to the collection. As a long-ago principal of the TwinCo record label, he once built a record press—a machine that stamped out wax records, that is—in a garage, and produced a 78-rpm recording of Slim Jim the Vagabond Kid singing “Nikolina” and other favorites. It hangs under glass in the museum’s conference room.

Bakken’s personal favorite item at the Pavek, however, is decidedly less colorful. What he prizes most is the multivolume RCA Electron Tube Handbook, a collection of manuals providing technical specifications for every vacuum tube once made by RCA. “I used these all the time for building equipment,” he says fondly. He means not just audio equipment but some other early devices he created in the garage shop that became Medtronic.