The Museum

Graham and Val’s museum collection is built around American, Australian, and New Zealand-made radios that many people will remember. There are several rare radios he thinks are the only operational radios of their kind left in New Zealand — a Majestic Church radio, and an Ariel clock radio that appears in the book The Golden Age of Radio in the Home by radio guru John Stokes.

The oldest is an Atwater Kent 1923 Breadboard set that has no cabinet or cover. The components are assembled on a wooden plinth called a breadboard. There are also many console radios from the late 1920s to the late 1940s, some with horn speakers.

The Columbus was common in New Zealand, and there are several Atwater Kent radios. Arthur Atwater Kent

Sr. (1873–1949) was an American inventor and manufacturer based in Philadelphia. Graham has a couple of AM (amplitude modulation) transmitters with a limited range of 300 feet (91.5m) or so, and he can feed them tapes of early radio shows. “When the museum is up and running you will be able to walk in and hear different shows. You might hear Churchill’s speech from one of the radios, Bob Hope, or an episode of Life with Dexter from others.”

He says the tone of some vintage radios is more mellow than digitally produced sound, with a bit more bass response. Other early radios and some horn speakers are very noisy and scratchy.

There are a only a few AM stations on the band these days and FM will slowly be replaced by digital.

“Soon there won’t be any signals for them so a swag of those radios will be obsolete. Even early rare transistor radios are becoming collectibles. Someone left an early National Panasonic on the back doorstep the other day.”

Art deco bakelite radios, of which he has several, are also collector’s items and quite popular as the material is of no interest to borer. New Zealand designed and produced Bell Colt radios were manufactured in a range of colours and the red ones are particularly sought after.