[GreenKeys] What is to become of NADCOMM?

[Paul Wills]

I tried to give an entire wire chief's office from the PRR station in
Baltimore to the Smithsonian.  There were totally uninterested.  It ended up
going to the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania where they pulled a "lost ark"
with it.

I hate to say it but I have little hope for "mainstream" museums.  They have
their agendas and there is little room for technical artifacts.  There, of
course, are a few exceptions.  The Telephone Pioneers museum in Seattle is
spectacular from what I've been told and there is another telephone museum
in Maine that deals in CO equipment and such.  It's really up to the private
collector with a "vision" such as Don, to do it right.

PDW


----- Original Message -----
From: "Jack" <wa2hwj@worldnet.att.net>
To: <greenkeys@mailman.qth.net>
Sent: Sunday, March 03, 2002 7:21 PM
Subject: Re: [GreenKeys] What is to become of NADCOMM?


> It's surprising that with all of the telegraph stuff that's always on Ebay
> that a museum couldn't spend the few bucks to have an entire system in
> operation.
> I recently purchased a neat circuit board that sends "What Hath God
> Wrought!" to a telegraph sounder. My Western Electric sounder worked the
> first time I wired it up to the board.
>
> *************
>
> This leads me to something that I have been wanting to mention to the
> Greenkeys gang and keep forgetting:
>
> Has anyone been to the Smithsonian lately? I finally got there for the
first
> time in early December. While the air and space display is great, I
couldn't
> find one Teletype. Then I went through another hall where there was all
> sorts of mechanical stuff, from vehicles through complete newpaper
> publishing displays...but not one Teletype. As I was getting towards the
end
> of the display (and my wife got tired of me muttering "...there's no
> Teletypes!!"), I found a poor Model 28ASR labelled as a "police data
> terminal" or something like that. It had most of the keys missing or
dropped
> into the keyboard shroud and the top plate of the TD was gone (and, oddly
> enough, it wasn't the plate that snaps off). Unfortunately, it sits pretty
> close where kids (another name for vandals) could get at it.
> Has anyone ever heard of any displays dedicated to
> telephone/telegraph/teletype at the Smithsonian? I do understand that they
> move the displays in and out and they can't show everything, but, heck,
the
> "computer" display had more junk than real historically-important gear. I
> wonder if the idea behind the displays is to show things that no one ever
> saw versus what really made the difference to the growth of the country?
> I would hope that Don's stuff doesn't disappear like the old AT&T displays
> did years ago. Just remember that last scene from "Raiders of the Lost
> Ark"...!
>
> Jack WA2HWJ
>
>
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