Radio Museum Rotterdam
March 2026
When I was reading through this
website when I realized there is one
radio museum in Rotterdam I've never heard of. In the online maps it seems like a small white
building up north.
I told Tina about it because her
project is also about radios. We went to check it out. Turns out the old white building is owned
by the
municipality of Rotterdam and there are still traces of the museum on it. The building looks
tiny and is next to
a gas station? Very strange place...
Then we realized the museum is across the street not in this building with pictures of old radio
ads on its
walls. There is an electronics store called CORRECT and it looks like it jumped out of the
2000s.
Inside on the 3rd floor there is the Radio Museum. We are greeted by a number of old devices and
it all looks
scattered around. There is a Mignon 2 that sits next to the stairs and it looks like it has
never been cleaned.
After looking at everything outside, we decided to go in.
The initial corridor was full of radios and audio devices for sale. Then there were some shelves
of books about
maintenance and repair of all sorts of electronics.
When we got to the main room we asked to
have a
volunteer show us around. He was an old man who used to work in electronics sector (don't
remember exactly
where) and he had been working at the museum since 2014. He showed us everything and we asked
him to turn
basically every other device on. We listened to a very old Phonograph Cylinder :) That was
really amazing. They
had a working broadcast TV station system. We tried together to fix the teleprompter.
What I really liked about this museum was that it sprouted from 1 radio enthusiasts collection.
The previous
owner of the museum(also the owner of CORRECT :)) had his own collection grow so much that he
wanted to share it
with the public in a public space. Of course this museum is free for visitors as the others :)
The volunteer
told us
the more the collection grew, the more locals from the nearby area started donating their own
old tech there. At
the end
the collection became more than just radios, it included marine radios and navigation systems,
computers,
recording and audio devices, broadcasting equipment.
Another interesting thing about this
museum was the
fact that
as a part of their collection, they had a work desk. It looked almost exactly like the one that
is still being
used at the Houweling Telecom Museum. We asked about it because we both wanted to see the
ancient tools laying
around work. But the volunteer told us it is only for show, because rapair is a part of history
now... That was
really weird to hear, heart breaking but true in a way. It was a confrontational moment where we
had to think
about the death of things very clearly.
There were many interesting devices in the museum.
The most
interesting things were the amount of different types of woven covers for all the amplifiers and
the handmade
radios that survived the big 'illegal' radio burning of Rotterdam during the WW ii. The white
building we saw
was the building where the municipality gathered all the radios and burned them to control
communication
channels. They had a big poster from 1940s that declared the big cleanup and along with that a
lot of small
containers with crystal radios in them. The also had a display of crystals that could replace
the ones inside
them.
