TURNING BACK THE DIAL

IT’S BEEN CALLED “the world’s finest collection” of pre-war televisions – of which there are fewer in existence than Stradivarius violins – and the seeds were planted when a 13-year-old boy saved his money to buy his family’s first set in 1955.

The boy was Moses Znaimer – Canadian media mogul and founder and CEO of Zoomer Media (which includes Vision TV and this magazine) – who in May opened his MZTV Museum of Television to the public ( www.mztv.com).

“I started [collecting] in the mid-1960s but completely amateur, completely intuitive, impulsive and primarily oriented to the esthetics,” he recalls. “I thought it was a beautiful device.”

Television, of course, became a lifelong passion for Moses, who proved one of the medium’s innovators through original concepts like open studios and living buildings (utilized at the famed Citytv building on a stretch of Toronto’s Queen Street West now known as Moses Znaimer Way) the first “selfies” (Citytv videographers who filmed themselves with handheld cameras) and the first user-generated television content (from Speakers Corner at Queen and John Streets).

The set that inspired Moses’ collection – a 1958 Philco Predicta “Pedestal” (left) – resides in the museum, located at the Zoomer Plex in Toronto’s Liberty Village, along with everything from Marilyn Monroe’s TV to the first commercial television produced by pioneer John Logie Baird to that Speakers Corner booth. Moses became a serious collector in 1992 and continues to amass publications and “original papers from the work and the lives of [television pioneers] whose names and reputations I’m trying to resurrect.”

“What Moses has put together here is a worldbeater,” filmmaker Jan Leman ( TV is King) said at the museum’s opening. It’s a sentiment that TV historian Michael Bennett-Levy echoed. “It’s extraordinary. There’s nowhere else in the world that’s got it like this.” —MC