[GreenKeys] govliq: huge pile of teletypes (Tobyhanna, PA)

[Martin]

This brings to mind a story which was written in one of our UK Vintage 
radio magazines. It was rather an interesting wake up to reality.

A very large stash of vintage radios, new in boxes, was found in an 
underground bunker store, probably been there since before the war, but 
in dry storage conditions. There must have been hundreds of the sort of 
sets people are buying at auctions for 100s or even 1000s of pounds, and 
then those are not even in new condition. These were new and boxed from 
the factory. The collector/owner sought advice to try and maximise the 
financial value of his find. After some considerable deliberation, he 
decided the best course of action was to arrange for the whole lot to 
meet with a nasty destructive accident. A heap of explosives, also 
stored since the war, performed the job well.

The reason for his decision was that to release such a quantity of rare 
and valuable receivers onto the market would have undermined the whole 
vintage radio market and wipe the value off every collection already 
existing.

The moral of this story is perhaps that if all those new and boxed 
teleprinters did come onto the market, it would make a lot of people a 
bit depressed about all the time they spent derusting and restoring 
their own personally salvaged bits of treasure. Probably.

I did hear of a large quantity of wartime R1155 receivers, new and 
wrapped in tropical protection, being mined out of the bottom of a 
mineshaft, where they had been dumped by the government, but this may be 
folklore( the bit about them being retrieved I mean).

But I do suspect there is lots of scope for the modern archeaologist 
whose house is built on old landfill sites, and there are many of them 
in UK.

Martin



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