Capt. Mondo's World o' Mondo-ness

Visit to the MZTV Museum
Since this museum is not open on weekends now that the summer is over, I decided to head on over to Moses Znaimer's world-class collection of TV sets today. I called ahead and discovered that the guided tour times posted on their Web site are in fact the only times the museum is open – it's the guided tour or nothing. Turns out that normally the museum is usually the end point of a tour that takes people "behind the scenes" at the CityTV, and the museum is not normally open in and of itself for casual touring. Given the rarity of some of the pieces in the museum – a few of them one of a kind – I can also understand that they want to keep an eye on people. (At one point in the tour I asked if I could put my hand above a certain set in order to see how much heat it gave off, but was warned not to as it might set of the alarm).

I got there by noon, and the woman at the front counter called up the person who would be my tour guide. There was no grand tour of the adjacent building going on at the moment, so it would be a tour of one for me. I was lucky in that the tour guide was very knowledgeable about the collection and told me plenty of things I didn't already know about several individual sets, most of which were present at the ROM's big show on them a few years ago.

The museum itself is held in a relatively small space on the second floor of the building which acts as the ChumCity store. No wheelchair or elevator access unfortunately. It's not huge, but for those people interested in the development of TV technology, it is a mecca. Along one wall is a section devoted entirely to mechanical TVs, all dating to the late 1920s and 1930s. The mechanical TVs all worked using a large spinning disk and a variable light source which, when everything was properly synchronized and working just right, produced a small, monochromatic picture. The real prize in this section is the British-made mechanical set made by John Logie Baird, the only working example of this type of set left in the world. On the pedestal below the set was a small screen showing the type of picture it could generate: a red-tinged 30-line vertically-scanned picture, at its best when showing sharp contrasts. Also interesting was the TV "kit" set made by a ham for amateur mechanical TV broadcasting to other hams. Then there's the set with a huge wheel that offered three different "channels", each defined solely by the placement and number of the holes contained on the wheel.

The next wall features early electronic sets from the late 1930s, including the full line of sets offered by RCA in 1939 at the World's Fair. The centerpiece of this section is the famous RCA TV set whose shell is made of see-through Lucite, which was put on show throughout the 1939 World's Fair. It was made of Lucite in order to show that there were no "smoke and mirrors" at work, and for many people this was their first exposure to television. It is surrounded by a guide rail designed to emulate the one that was used at the Fair. The guide told me that the apparently the set was recovered from Israel, where the set was originally sent by RCA for parts, the early collector who acquired it apparently realizing its significance. Though it was not plugged in, I was told that the set still works. In fact, a few of sets were turned on, playing a continuous loop of early TV shows. I asked and apparently with one exception, there were all using the original TV tubes, so what you were seeing was close to what would have originally been experienced (though perhaps not as clear, there being no such thing as a direct cable feed back then).

The third wall is flanked by post-war TV sets, all good representative examples of innovation in TV design that occurred in the late 1940s and 50s. All of these sets used circular screens (sometimes cut off at the sides), most of them coming from plants that made radar screens during the war. There's an all-bakelite TV set, one of the first widely affordable sets available to the public, which is an impressive piece of plastic. Then there is the color set which used a cumbersome mechanical system in order to achieve colour pictures. Problem was that it was not backward compatible with the black and white signals then widely in use, and the whole production line – save for this set and one other – was scrapped. Apparently TV maker DuMont liked to see how far he could push tube technology back in the 1950s to see how big a screen he could get before it couldn't produce a picture any longer. The end result is the 30" screen "Royal Sovereign" model they have on display, a behemoth of a set which I was told required four strong men to move, and had to be lifted to the second floor of the museum using an oversized forklift.

The final major part of the display concentrates on some of the more stylish sets of the 1950s, including the whole classic line of Predicta TV set, and the mind-boggling Kuba West German set, dominated by its great triangular swiveling "sail" which held the TV screen, contained no less than eight speakers as well as a radio and phonograph. Adjacent to this are some of the "space helmet" sets made by a few manufactures in the early 1970s, and this, along with a few examples of early TV display tubes pretty much concludes the line-up of things to see in the museum.

Though photographs are not allowed in the museum, I was able to sneak a couple of shots while the guide wasn't looking, which should give you a sense of what the museum is like. I was told by the guide that the museum is a not-for-profit institution, and that Moses Znaimer is still actively collecting interesting sets, and that somewhere there is a warehouse containing a number of duplicate sets and spares. Apparently they regularly get offers for old TV sets, and every now and then they score some real finds. He apparently also has an extensive collection of TV-related ephemera, and there are plans in the works to open up an additional research centre for students studying the development of media. So the museum is far from being a static institution.

This is not a museum for everybody. I've always been fascinated with the subject of the development of radio and TV technology, so it has a strong appeal to me, focusing on the technological developments rather than the shows, which is often what you see at other museums that look at the early days of television. Still, it's cheap at $6 (less for students, kids and seniors) and I came away happy.