A fun trip through communications history

The newly-opened Signals Museum, in Huntsville, Ala., is both educational and enjoyable

I had a ticket to see a comedy show in Huntsville, Alabama, about an hour and a half drive south of where I live in Tennessee. A few weeks before the event, I happened to see some Facebook posts about the grand opening of Signals, a new museum in Huntsville. I was intrigued, and since the comedy show was on a Sunday night, it would be easy for me to drive down a little early and check it out on the way.

Of course, Signals will probably never compete with Huntsville’s biggest tourist attraction, the U.S. Space and Rocket Center, but it’s well-positioned to piggyback on the space center’s traffic and I suspect it would appeal to many of the same people.

Signals bills itself as a “museum of information explosion,” which basically means communications technology. The exhibit starts with early experiments in electricity but quickly moves to practical applications — the telegraph, the telephone, phonograph, radio, television and computers.

The museum contains a huge and lovingly-curated collection of antique radios, TV sets, telephones, phonographs, vacuum tubes, computers and what have you. There are interactive video screens and exhibits, such as a telephone…