Please touch the objects.

Well, some of them.

Ever willing to challenge traditional museum practice, the National Communications Museum exhibition team quickly gravitated to a school of thought that would strike fear in many a conservator or collection manager: free the object.

With a smattering of rarer exceptions, our collection is largely a representative sample of mass-produced consumer technologies. These technologies are so integrally active within our daily experience that it can seem ostentatious to put a 2007 Nokia mobile — like that one that’s kicking around in your desk drawer — in an acrylic display case. It simply doesn’t reflect our social experience of these items.

This aversion to acrylic and fervour for freedom is not without its challenges or exceptions. We won’t be exposing centuries-old prototype receivers or hazardous chemical batteries to the elements (or our visitors), but we are choosing to challenge the ‘look but don’t touch’ museum mantra for many of our objects.

Collection custodians are in the business of managing change, of lengthening the useful lifespan of an otherwise inevitably decay-bound object. Choosing to activate collection items is a choice in hastening this change. If that makes you uneasy, remember that expensive environmentally-controlled storage or tut-tutting at boundary-pushing visitors does not stop this change, only slows it.

Change isn’t always bad. Sometimes change is what keeps an object alive.

For many of our collection items, the function of the object — including the skills needed to operate and maintain it — carries more meaning than its form. In our collection, that form is typically a big grey box. To the untrained eye, these grey boxes elicit little emotional response or even recognition but once they do something, they have the potential to evoke nostalgia, connection and deep learning.

In making the choice to activate an object, to let it do rather than just be, we walk the delicate and hotly contested tightrope that is significance vs physical longevity. These conversations often lead to increasingly existential questions: what are we trying to preserve? Is it a thing or a feeling? Does a musical instrument cease to be an instrument if it is not played?

If change to an object is inevitable — which it is — and we preserve and share the collection for the benefit of the community — which we do — shouldn’t we use this fleeting opportunity to share our collection in a manner that has the greatest impact on the community?

Activating historical objects is not simply a case of ‘plugging it in’. Historical machinery and electrical goods can require significant modification to keep it functional and safe. For each activated item, we develop a ‘Care Plan’ which outlines the limits of operation, maintenance requirements and steps for operator safety. Remember, OH&S has undergone a big reboot since these objects’ heydays.

To give you a sense of our Care Plan process, let’s look at our most-loved activated big grey box: the 1954 Mark II Speaking Clock, colloquially known as “George.”*

Generations of Australians will fondly remember the novelty of calling 1194, especially as daylight savings rolled around (“Was it one hour forward or back? I can never remember…”). Dial-for information services extended beyond the temporal. Sporting enthusiasts could ‘Dial a Cricket Champ’ and Telemed services offered by the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners educated a thong-wearing public on the dangers of tetanus in the garden. Though there is more information at our fingertips than ever before, the service remained popular into its twilight years with 2 million annual calls in its last year of operation, 2019.

At ten second intervals, the voice of Gordon Gow announced accurate time to callers. The Mark II, much like the Mark I and French l’horloge parlante before it, read the time from glass discs (or cylinders in the latter’s case) using photoelectric cell vacuum tubes. Like the audio on motion picture film, the recordings are inscribed in concentric circles around the glass disc and ‘read’ using light. Each disc carries a different part of the message “At the third stroke, it will be (hours) (minutes) and (seconds) seconds.”

The discs rotate on a shaft at a constant speed, synchronised to a time standard — varying from pendulum clocks to caesium beam atomic clocks in later iterations — as a series of cams move the photocells to the relevant section of the disc. The light from the mounted lamps is blocked intermittently by the disc recording, changing the resistance in the photocell; resulting in an electric current fed to the output speaker.

To keep the clock in action, our technical volunteers have been making some necessary modifications. The photocells move by virtue of cams mounted on the carrier shaft, each requiring bearings in order to move smoothly and in time. Technical volunteer, Robert Muir, has been replacing grease-choked original bearings with new lubricated bearings to keep the clock ticking along. We will determine a regular schedule to inspect, maintain or replace these bearings and other consumables going forward.

The glass discs are not at risk of the wear and tear that you might find with vinyl discs, as information is gleaned through light rather than a needle. While the discs are robust — extreme vibrations permitting — the lamps that activate the photocells that read the discs (“that lay in the house that Jack built”) have a finite lifespan and are no longer commercially available. After decades of service to the Australian public, these lamps are ready to retire. Technical volunteer, Richard Schipper, developed an LED iteration of the lamps to prolong this function of the clock. The LED lamps are sympathetic to the style of the original lamps — as is the goal in all conservation — and will provide light for years to come, reducing the need for, and risk that comes with, intervention.

The Speaking Clock is no doubt a feat of electromechanical engineering in its own right, but it is the magical sense of human presence in the knowing voice of the announcement that makes this object special. The Speaking Clock provided not only information to generations of Australians but a sense of connection and the comfort of a human voice down the telephone line.

Does the replacement of original bearings or modified lamps undermine the experience of connecting to the Speaking Clock? We don’t think so. The significance of the Speaking Clock is in its ability to connect people to information through the artificial intelligence of its design. What better way to preserve this object than to continue to that connection.

We are fortunate to have a small and highly skilled team of technical volunteers who are dedicated to keeping these electromechanical-beasts humming. Fortunately, “George” is one of the simpler exhibits to keep alive. When things break in a mechanical system, the symptoms can usually be diagnosed, parts replaced or repaired and motion restored. Historical digital systems, however, are a whole different ball game.

But that’s a story for another day.

*Alarmed purists please rest assured that we keep a duplicate, unchanged Mark II clock in environmentally-controlled storage. Old habits die hard.

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