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Museum highlights legacy of Md. defense electronics
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“For me it’s fascinating,” says former reliability engineer Barry Gerstenber, of Tannersville, Pa., as he looks at a display on noise jamming procedures at the Historical Electronics Museum in Linthicum.
BALTIMORE (Map, News) - Beam me to Linthicum, Scotty.
Ever wonder where legendary electronic devices, like the TV camera Neil Armstrong used on the moon, the radar device that tracked the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor or the German Enigma code-making machine of World War II, ended up?
Many are at the Historical Electronics Museum in Linthicum, and Director Mike Simon is getting ready to receive yet another complex curiosity — a World War II German “Giant Wrzburg” radar antenna, lately used to study solar noise — to add to this 28-year-old museum’s static and interactive collection of defense electronics.
“What we present here is primarily the history of defense electronics,” Simon said of his five-employee, 30-volunteer staff, “as it was produced in Maryland and in the Baltimore area.”
“Our mission is to educate, inspire, and excite the interest of students and the general public,” the museum’s Web site says, “by presenting to them our electronics heritage through the collection, preservation, and display of significant artifacts and literature ... in the field of electronics.”
Nine galleries — including those dedicated to a half-century of radar development, communications, electronic countermeasures, optics, space sensors, and undersea detection and imaging — convey this unique heritage. They, along with an outdoor display of heavier equipment, constitute 42,000 square feet of free offerings to the public.
“We have probably the world’s largest collection of electronic countermeasure devices,” said Simon, an anthropologist who has spent two years with the museum. “And we have a temporary gallery, which is being set up to exhibit the history of Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Lab.”
Located on the campus of Northrop Grumman Corp., which, along with the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, helps fund the $500,000-a-year membership- and grant-driven nonprofit, the Historical Electronics Museum also offers special programs for school groups.
The annual Young Engineers and Scientists Seminar program for local high school juniors and seniors starts Thursday. Here, 150 students compete for prizes in a seven-week course of alternate weekly lectures and engineering problem-solving culminating in the judged design of a dialysis machine.
“I think it’s the only museum of its kind,” said retired Westinghouse Corp. engineer Stan Lebar, designer of Apollo 11’s TV camera. “I know the Smithsonian leans very heavily on them.”
“What we’re really trying to do is grow and get the word out that we exist.” Simon said.
Historical Electronics Museum
1745 W. Nursery Road
Linthicum, Md. 21090
410-765-9617; hem-usa.org
