JKL Museum of Telephony lost in fire | Hacker News Reader

JKL Museum of Telephony lost in fire

jklmuseum.com

61 pointsschoen9 comments

This is a huge loss for telecommunications history preservation.

While the Museum of Communications (http://museumofcommunications.org/) in Seattle has switching equipment (much of it one-of-a-kind - JKL specialized in Station Hardware and other items, and had many priceless one-of-a-kind prototypes and the like - it will be hard to duplicate or find again everything that was located at JKL - JKL was also starting collect extensive documentation for preservation as well.

I'm just heartbroken at the scale of the loss, I'd targeted JKL for my next trip into California, but I guess I'm too late.

Recent photos (not mine) show the extensive collection lost to a forest fire.

http://cowboyfrank.net/galleries/Trips/2015-08/index.htm#jkl

Why would anyone house priceless artefacts like that in a forest in a fire-prone area? Why would anyone build anything in a fire-prone forest?

I'm gonna guess you're not from California.

I'd not call it a forrest fire prone area by any measure, any more than any real estate with a stand of trees is.

Looking at it on the map, the warning signs are all there: suburban-rural interface, western slope, wooded area with no firebreaks, and a climate with hot and dry summers. Couldn't pay me enough to settle there.

That could be any number of places in the west though, including much of the edges of the Seattle Metro too.

I grew up with fire really, the issue really is the forrest service policy on fire from the early part of the 20th century into the early 90's - which is to say never allowing any fire ever, so because the smaller fires which would remove excess fuel on the forrest floor every decade or two, we now live in a world where every small fire becomes a major conflagration.

Nearly every major forrest fire we have is a byproduct of those forrest management policies.

Cheap real estate and that's where the owner wanted to live?

Sorry to hear about the fire. We need more efforts to keep phone history alive. So much of our computer science is rooted in telephony -- information theory, Unix, C etc.

The telephone museum in Ellsworth Maine is still open. I took my retired Telephone Man father there and he thought it was great.

Http://thetelephonemuseum.org

This appears to be the fire, and it is a rather large one:

http://cdfdata.fire.ca.gov/incidents/incidents_details_info?...

I wonder how much they can salvage, if anything...

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