Museum of Television, founded by broadcaster Moses Znaimer, is the world's
first museum dedicated to television sets and ephemera.
Its mission is to secure the technological history of the television
receiver, and to contribute to the understanding of television's impact by
collecting, displaying, documenting and interpreting television sets and
related ephemera. The Museum presents educational programmes and makes its
library and resources available to scholars and students. The Museum also
intends to tell the story of television by involving the public in an MZTV
oral history project and by using electronic kiosks and computer websites.
The idea for the MZTV collection was born when Moses Znaimer noticed a
Philco Predicta television in a producer's office. Znaimer admired the
design of the Predicta and determined to have one. He quickly
discovered how difficult old television sets were to come by. Victims of
their own success, television sets had become so familiar and ubiquitous
and so quickly superseded technologically that they were not
objects of respect. Television sets were also cheap enough that there was
little effort put into fixing them when they began to fail. Thus, when
people bought a new television set, the old one was thrown out. Rather than
ending up in repositories of collectibles, old television sets were more
often destroyed.
Znaimer set out to give the television set the respect he felt it was due
as the single most influential invention of our time. He did indeed get his
Philco Predicta in fact, he got three of them and
ended up building what may be the world's most extensive collection of
television sets. The core of his collection is comprised of approximately
360 television receivers; 12,000 assorted television tubes, lamps,
capacitors, etc.; 1475 schematics and manuals for televisions; 200 items of
television memorabilia, including the original Felix the Cat broadcast
model; a library of over 300 books on television; 1200 television
magazines; and 300 still photographs.
Znaimer also set out to restore common memory of the inventors and dreamers
who gave us what Znaimer calls "this astonishing technology; the most
important cultural phenomenon of the twentieth century", and has also
collected for the MZTV Museum an extensive reference library and other
support material.
Of 7,000 television sets made before the Second World War, only 114 are
still known to exist and, as Moses Znaimer has pointed out, there are fewer
prewar television sets in the world today than there are Stradivarius
violins. While there are museums in the U.S. dedicated to television
programming, the MZTV Museum is the only museum in the world which is
dedicated to the apparatus of television and its technological history.
The MZTV Museum is open by appointment to scholars and interested members
of the public. Watching TV, originally presented at the Institute
of Contemporary Culture of the Royal Ontario Museum and now showing in an
enhanced form at the Canadian Museum of Civilization, marks the first major
display of core holdings from the MZTV Museum.
MZTV Museum address:
277 Queen Street West
Toronto, Ontario M5V 1Z9
tel: (416) 599-7339
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