Go to a Steampunk Radio Museum 📻

Nerd vacation

Ask any sound engineer I’ve worked with over the years. I’m not a gearhead. I started in radio during the waning days of reel-to-reel tape, which made me weep in frustration. Then I survived the introduction of failure-prone DAT and minidisc recorders, and stayed up many a night on deadline trying to undo some mistake I made in ProTools or another DAW. 

As a survival tactic over the years, I’ve adopted a stance one might call “Do I Need to Know What This Knob Is For?” If my touching the knob has the potential to make things worse, then I do not want to touch it. I defer when possible to an engineer who is not only going to do a better job, but knows when the knobs are about to be replaced by some other technology.

Whether you’re a gear enthusiast or gear-avoider, the cure you need this summer is to visit a wireless museum. These shrines to audio tech, scattered around the US and many other countries, are filled with restored — or at least cleaned-up — gear going back to the dawn of radio. Here, you may find the heavy, wide-belled loudspeakers that preceded electrical speakers. There will be wood-cased radio receivers covered with knobs, and you can rest easy not knowing what any of those are for. You may encounter vacuum tubes, telegraph levers and weird-looking microphones. Everything will smell of metal filings and WD40. You may hear the faint signal of AM radio wafting from some old receiver on display, one that’s been fully restored or donated by a person who’s kept it in working order for decades.

The people who run these places are almost always volunteers who may have worked in radio or the signal corps of a military branch — or they’re relatives of someone who was into antique electronics, and their hobby keeps that person’s memory alive.

All these radio museums are labors of love. There’s a huge one just outside Minneapolis. One in Maryland, another Huntington, West Virginia. Connecticut. Bloomfield, New York. Asheville, North Carolina. The UK, especially London but also the Orkney Islands, have radio old-stuff going on. So does Denmark. Do not sleep on Bologna, Italy, home to the Marconi Museum. Long ago, I visited the Radio Laboratory Museum in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia. You can find these places almost anywhere, if you look. Call ahead because the hours are probably limited and the websites may not be updated.

Look, I know a lot of miserable things are happening in the world and it may be hard to justify a bit of escapism that is not a beach or a roller coaster. But these places have meaning to them — and if you work in audio, you probably could use a little meaning right now.

Not bookish

Back when I was starting a Nieman Fellowship and had checked out every book in the Harvard Library about broadcast history, I was getting flummoxed by lots of opaque old-radio terminology. Spark gap? Audion? Superheterodyne? 

It all made more sense, and became a lot more interesting, after I went down to the New England Steam and Wireless Museum. I arrived during an event weekend, so there were guys (yes, all guys, no surprise) on hand to tap out Morse Code on a spark-gap transmitter, the first radio-wave transmitting technology. Another volunteer stood in front of a display on Edwin Armstrong, inventor of FM radio, and told me the whole sad story of the inventor’s failed patent-war with RCA. I heard how the museum gets far more donations of old equipment than the volunteers can handle. So many items on display were once someone’s prized possession. The original owners had likely saved up to buy this equipment and loved it, because listening was their doorway to the world. The museum gave me a tangible sense of broadcasting’s power and what all the terms in my books actually meant to people.

The enthusiasm of the volunteers also made me a little sad for our own era. Will the knob settings of our old ProTools sessions be saved? Will a volunteer guide someday speak to visitors in front of the display case labeled Spotify Destroys Gimlet? Will some enthusiast recount the saga of Caliphate over a picnic outside? I have my doubts!

Yes, producers should still take the necessary steps to preserve their podcasts for posterity. But it’s hard to imagine a future shrine to our work, unless perhaps a sentient AI takes an interest in podcasts following the Singularity.¹ Anyway, best to visit your nearest wireless museum in the meantime, while you can.

The magic eye

More than a decade ago, I met a man named Pat Herbert at the Hearsay International Audio Festival in western Ireland. Herbert was there with just a fraction of the collection he had amassed at the Hurdy Gurdy Radio Museum, housed in an old look-out tower outside Dublin. I never got to visit the museum, but Danish producer Rikke Houd did, with her microphone, and from that created two of the most beautiful pieces on radio I’ve ever heard: Listen (with Falling Tree Productions) and The Light, commissioned by Australian producers and illustrated by the graphic designer Anthony Calvert.

In The Light, Herbert describes the first time he heard the radio as a child in 1947, which was also the first time he saw artificial light — the green “magic eye” of the radio as it broadcast a soccer match over shortwave from the US. I saw this animated radio-poem at the following year’s Hearsay Festival in 2015 — and soon after, was able to bring it to US air on the show where I then worked, The World.

Pat Herbert died in 2020. Jesse Cox, the genius Australian producer who commissioned The Light, died even earlier, in 2017 at the age of only 31. Researching this post, I found many links to Jesse’s work are already gone — just one sad example of the encroaching AI slop, junked domains and error pages we encounter all too often these days. 

Unlike the Internet, broadcasting — at least in theory — never disappears. It just travels on through space. Sometimes our voices hitch a ride on the waves.

“They’ve been there from the beginning of Time, but nobody knew,” says Pat Herbert’s lovely Irish voice. “That’s where it all began. I don’t know where it’s going to end. There’s a great big universe out there. We really don’t know, so little about it, the future, you know. But that’s the past.”

Do you have another wireless or radio-adjacent shrine to recommend? Leave it in the comments!

1  For a wonderful “speculative journalism” series based on just this very premise, check out Bellwether by Olive Samuel Greenspan.