From Wales to New Zealand, you can find telly addicts who have devoted their entire lives to hoarding the earliest ever TVs. These vintage technology freaks desperate to preserve history run television museums as passion projects. They are hidden away in barns, vans and sheds – and they are run without funding; these places are powered on nostalgia alone. As broadcast television celebrates its 80th birthday, we meet the obsessive owners of the most unique TV museums.
The one that sounds like a Star Wars character
This vintage TV museum on wheels used to broadcast outside Buckingham Palace. With a name that makes it sound like a Star Wars character – the 1969 CMCR9 North 3, Type 2, C9 – the North 3 was the roving control room that captured the first days of colour TV. It was abandoned for 25 years before being bought in 2008 and fully restored by Steve Harris. Today, it’s the only remaining (working) BBC broadcast mobile with its original cameras.
“One was probably used on the wedding of Charles and Diana and prime ministers like Harold Wilson and Margaret Thatcher,” says Harris. “There is still a lot to be done on North 3; it’s never-ending,” he adds. “It has taken over all my spare time – but it is keeping me busy beyond retirement age.”
• North 3
The one with TVs the size of a fridge
Mike Bennett has been hoarding televisions since he was a child. At one point, his collection got so large that it filled his home, his garage and an entire rented barn. Today, it has an unlikely location: an even larger barn in the village of Beaford, North Devon that is packed with pre-war and colour TVs, vintage video ephemera and TV history. The rarest items, says Bennett, are the Ekco experimental colour TV from the late 1950s, and the black-and-white sets from the 1940s and 1950s that are so big they’re the size of refrigerators. “I don’t like to see old technology being scrapped, especially when there is a danger that it may one day be gone forever,” he says. “I think it’s human nature to preserve the past, but perhaps it’s just me and all the other old fools who are far too sentimental.”
• South West England Vintage Television Museum
The first one in the US
Dedicated to tech from the 20s to the 50s, The Early is set in a bungalow in Hilliard, Ohio. In 2001, retired cable TV businessman Steve McVoy realised “there was no museum in the US that focused on early television – so I started one.” His prized possession is a TK-41 – the first ever colour TV camera, introduced to America in 1954. And parked outside is an original van from WGSF TV, the station in Newark, Ohio that covered Richard Nixon’s 1972 election win.
• The Early Television Foundation and Museum
The one that filmed JFK
Liam O’Hainnin, originally from Ireland but based in the German town of Pfungstadt, has been fascinated with the world of television ever since an Irish TV crew came to his dad’s farm to make a documentary in the 60s. Now, he has over 70 sets from the 1920s and 1930s, including a mechanical one with a Nipkow wheel, designed by none other than John Logie Baird. The museum is in his home, and splays across an anteroom, a guestroom and even a bathroom – a number of small TVs sit over the toilet.
But perhaps his most prized item is the Kod TV camera that recorded John F Kennedy’s famous “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech in Berlin in 1963. The camera has a famously large Taylor Hobson lens – “I got it from one of the cameramen that had it,” says O’Hainnin. He also has a 1939 prototype called a DE 7 R – the first square screen in the world of which only 50 models were built. (It was never mass-produced because of the second world war.)
• Farvis Fernsehmuseum Pfungstadt
The one with a TV the size of a postage stamp
Brian Belanger opened the National Capital Radio and Television museum in a century-old farmhouse in Bowie, Maryland, back in 1999. Its aim is to tell the story of how television came from radio, so its collection includes a See-All scanning disc TV set from 1931, “where you would watch a tiny picture the size of a postage stamp,” says Belanger. Also on show is a Crosley Reado from 1939, which was like a fax machine that worked by radio. “In the middle of the night, radio stations would broadcast a signal to the device, and by the morning, you would have a long strip of paper with your morning newspaper,” he says.
• The National Capital Radio and Television Museum
The one for Starship Trooper fans
In the village of Waipu, New Zealand, former child actor Tylor Keith has turned a 1957 fire station into an art gallery, with a shed out back full of actor autographs and original props. His favourite items include costumes from the American TV shows Married With Children, Hannah Montana and even a Mobile Infantry pin from Starship Troopers.
The one that still dreams of Jeannie
Former TV repairman Larry Auman has been collecting sets for half a century (he’s been in the business since 1964, so finding TVs from the late 1930s and 1940s wasn’t hard at first). He kept his collection in a small room above his garage until he opened his museum in Dover, Ohio in 2004. Today, Auman has 160 TV sets, plus props, adverts and 60s board games of shows like I Dream of Jeannie and The Jetsons. All he wants is for visitors to “look back at the sights and sounds of years gone by.”
