Ancient Web: Dave Hunter Kept PEI's Telephone Museum Online

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

A telephone museum that lets you actually connect two old telephones through a switchboard is something different from a room full of objects behind glass.

Visit the Prince Edward Island Telephone Museum pages

Dave Hunter assembled a private collection of telecommunications equipment connected with Prince Edward Island, Canada. The museum's surviving website is extraordinary partly because it is so unpolished: a sprawling sequence of photographs, dated additions, technical descriptions, donors' names, and changes to how the exhibits were wired together.

The museum progress page records acquisitions from 2005 onward, including a Northern Electric 1240 switchboard, military field telephones, a Western Electric 151AL candlestick telephone, and business switching systems from later decades.

This was not simply a display of shiny antique phones. The author describes repairing missing pieces, reconstructing wooden panels, adapting power supplies, and connecting restored instruments so visitors could place calls between them.

The switchboard outlived its building

A detailed section explains the process of making magneto telephones connect through the old Tyne Valley board. The author reports that by October 2006 he had solved the remaining power-supply problems and could demonstrate calls across the vintage equipment. Other entries track a programmable Nortel Norstar 6x16 system and the desire to connect it to a working Strowger switching demonstration.

The online telephone collection arranges photographs by wall sets, metal desk telephones, Bakelite and plastic phones, payphones, switches, and accessories. Its descriptions include a photograph of the Tyne Valley exchange in the early 1970s, showing the operators who used the technology.

The site's later history is more difficult. A notice at the top of the progress page announces the physical museum's closure because of the collector's declining health and resources. The online museum states explicitly that the physical collection closed in 2020. The older progress page does not itself give a closure date for that notice, so the online collection is the clearer source for the year.

This is the sort of preservation story that becomes urgent only after the physical institution disappears. Its meticulous Web diary keeps the donors, repairs, wiring decisions, and fragile enthusiasm from vanishing with the exhibits.

Explore the preserved museum progress log and the catalog of old telephones.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.