Museum Review // Vintage Radio and Communications Museum of Connecticut
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During the summer the state of Connecticut offers a number of different places for free visits under a "CT Summer at the Museum" program and this summer Quentin and I decided we were going to check out a number of places on the list we had never been before. Our vist stop came on Thursday, August 10 2023, as we made our way up to Windsor, CT to see the Vintage Radio and Communications Museum of Connecticut.
I will state right away that there are likely two different types of people who would visit this museum and they are like either Quentin or myself. The fact that this museum has something for both of us is what makes it so special and a place you really must visit. It's educational, but it's also fun, so you can learn new things without really even knowing you're learning.
For Quentin, I feel like a lot of this technology was before his time so he hadn't seen or even realized it existed before. At the same time, for someone such as myself, I knew a lot of this technology existed but I'd never seen it up close and personal like this before. So whether you're aware of it or not, this museum does offer an experience of seeing it in person that just makes it all that much more wonderful.
From television to radio to telephones to computers to record players (and forms of playing music) it's all there and it's all documented. Quentin got to use a machine for Morse Code and that was neat. If you don't know what Morse Code is, after a visit to the museum you'll certainly be able to remember after you do it for yourself.
If you follow me on Instagram, you'll know that about a month or so ago I went to a tag sale and picked up two different sets of cassettes for the DC characters (Batman, Superman and more) and one for The Lone Ranger of old time radio shows. I'm really fascinated by how those all worked and have cassettes for The Shadow and other shows as well.
At The VR&CM they have an entire set up of an old radio station where part of it is where the actors would go to speak and do the sounds while another part is the booth with the record players and all of that. What people don't know is that sound only exists because our brain tells us what we're hearing. So if you use some coconuts to simulate the sound of horses walking, then our brains can register it as such, partly because we're being told so-- because of that suggestion.
It's funny in a weird way for me to think that all Quentin knows of telephones is the modern cell phones (such as iPhones) but yet I used a rotary phone when I was a kid so having him see the various stages of evolution in the world of telephones is really something I feel everyone should do for the sake of history.
The only thing I would've liked to see at the museum that I felt was missing was perhaps the way we used memory storage and such for computers. The way that the floppy disk evolved would've been neat to show Quentin because I don't think kids today really understand that there was a time when if you wanted to install a program (or game) on your PC you had to do so through a series of disks.
But overall this was a great experience. We spent about an hour and a half there as it was bigger than what I thought it was going to be based on looking at the website. Quentin got some plugs and a pen while I was sure to pick up a t-shirt before we left because this is definitely the type of place that I want more people to know about. This is also somewhere I'd really like to go back to in a few months and take my dad so he can everything here as well. It just feels like such a positive experience for all ages.
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