On Air with the Museum of Broadcast Technology

The museum is in a former bank building on Woonsocket’s historic Main Street.

Enter through the facade of the Renaissance Revival building across from Woonsocket City Hall, and you’ll think you’ve wandered onto the set of a 1950s television studio.

Scattered about the room, film cameras stand as tributes to the technology’s evolution. Tape machines play recordings of long-gone television shows, while upstairs, a green screen completes the effect of a mock 1952 news studio. Even the logos on the cameras betray their ages, the letters spelled out in bright midcentury hues.

The museum features technology from both television and radio.

One of the museum’s many tape machines.

While it might seem like a portal to another time, the Museum of Broadcast Technology is the passion project of a group of retired broadcast professionals. The collection encompasses both TV and radio equipment and preserves the half-century of history referred to by some as the “golden age of broadcasting,” when analog cameras and tape recorders ruled the airwaves.

“The video production industry itself has changed so much in the past ten years,” says Paul Beck, president and curator of the museum. “Today, a single person with a laptop and an iPhone is the equivalent of what people used to pay $15,000 a day for.”

Like many in the industry, Beck caught the TV bug young. As a high schooler, he volunteered at the Catholic Television Center, a studio run by the Archdiocese of Boston, eventually taking a full-time job there. He later worked for WHDH-TV (Boston’s former Channel Five) and at Emerson College, where he served as director of engineering for WERS and oversaw equipment in the college’s mass communications, film and journalism departments.

“I worked at Fenway Park, did the World Series in 1967 [and] Celtics games, mostly as a camera operator,” he says.

A poster from a former labor dispute in Boston.

In the early 2000s, many regional and local broadcast stations — as well as institutions like Emerson — were offloading their outdated equipment. A group of eight industry veterans, including Beck and former ABC engineer Tom Sprague, pooled their resources to establish a museum. Sprague, the group’s treasurer, purchased the former bank building and donated its use to the organization. Since then, the collection has continued to grow as members rescue obsolete equipment from studios and backyards across the country.

“One came from Indiana in a chicken coop,” Beck says. “[The previous owner] didn’t want to get rid of this, so he put it in his chicken coop.”

Today, the museum is open by appointment and encompasses more than fifty years of TV and radio history. In addition to cameras, visitors can explore a recreated 1942 radio station, vintage tape recorders, studio memorabilia and equipment bearing the logos of companies like ABC, NBC and RCA. An annual open house during the city’s Main Street Holiday Stroll draws close to 300 visitors every year, all of them eager to see themselves on camera at the mock TV studio.

Paul Beck demonstrates how to use a vintage camera.

While most of the items are sourced from out-of-state, a handful have local ties. Amperex Electronics, which operated a plant in Slatersville, once supplied the Plumbicon tubes that captured images in video cameras. Several other items have seen second lives as film and television props. When the team behind HBO’s “Julia” had to recreate Julia Child’s 1960s kitchen studio at WGBH in Boston, they used period-accurate cameras from the museum to complete the look.

“We’ve done at least a dozen films that we’ve provided props for,” Beck says.

The collection is vast, though its future is less certain. As digital media continue to replace other formats, Beck says, the challenge to restore and maintain the equipment, as well as find visitors who appreciate it, increases.

“Videotape has gone the way of the dinosaur. Everything is recorded digitally,” he says.

That may be true outside these doors. But inside this former bank building on Main Street, analog still reigns. 144 Main St., Woonsocket (open by appointment), wmbt.org