Sight Bites Visits the Early Television Museum - and You Should, Too
Tucked away in a nondescript building on a lonely side street in the Columbus suburb of Hilliard, Ohio, sits a hidden gem called the Early Television Museum.
Perhaps it should be named the Early Televisions Museum, for ETM isn't a museum that celebrates the medium, it's a museum that celebrates the conduit.
One needn't be a television fanatic or historian to marvel in wonder at the museum’s collection of more than 200 American- and European-made sets from the simplest prototypes of the 1920s to the ultra-modern color gizmos of the 1950s and beyond. A few of them actually work, and by pushing buttons on the wall, these ancient beasts slowly lumber to life and show grainy images of Milton Berle and “The Wizard of Oz" among other vintage fare.
The oldest specimens come from the Old World and many are said to be the world's lone remaining examples. Most of these earliest TVs - with screens as small as three inches - are also equipped with radios whose dials tune not to stations but to cities: Luxembourg, Vienna, Bonn, London and Dublin among them. Others have small screens that lay flat in the console and project upside-down images onto flip-mirrors where viewers watch the broadcast.
As television technology advanced, the screens grew larger and the sets were equipped with small record players - some of the exhibits had vintage records on them - and were housed in beautiful cabinets befitting a prime spot in the living room. The coolest thing about the collection is that it features TVs old enough and rare enough that most people who are not antique-TV enthusiasts have not seen many - if any - of the items on display.
There are large televisions made exclusively for bars. There’s a small TV designed for use in hospital rooms. And there’s the world’s only telejuke, a TV-jukebox hybrid that never caught on.
There’s even a video-phone-TV unit - an early version of FaceTime - on display.
The inventory also includes a good number of vintage neon signs, old advertisements - including a priceless Phillip Morris ad claiming their cigs are best on smokers’ throats - owners’ manuals and other once-common TV ephemera and miscellany that now litters dumps and landfills across the globe. Picture tubes, color converters, retail displays and even a surviving cardboard faux television with a clown on the “screen” are housed in the large, open space.
Stepping into a large, garage-like room at the back of the museum, visitors are greeted with studio cameras, a humongous transformer that once sat atop Columbus’ most-famous skyscraper and a mobile broadcasting unit last used by WGSF in Newark. You can go inside and sit behind the steering wheel or station yourself at the editing table in the rear and make believe you’re chasing breaking news. It’s like discovering Grandma’s attic after having an adventure in the rest of her home.
Mr and Mrs. Sound Bites visited the museum with our grand-Sound Nugget and electronics lover, Sean, who repeatedly called the museum the greatest place in the world and who - with a 7-year-old’s limited attention span - made sure we spent nearly two hours exploring the joint.
We were every bit enthralled as he and left wondering why we hadn't visited sooner.
The museum is open 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday and noon to 5 p.m. Sunday. More information is available on the website: http://www.earlytelevision.org.
