Some of you may remember that I used to collect valves. I started collecting when I was around 6 years old, although back then it was more to impress friends than collect. An old directly heated valve plus a Lego battery box lit my desk up at primary school. I did not start collecting in earnest until the 1990’s and launched my first online valve museum in 1999. Since then the collection grew in several directions at once, including German WW2 types, Russian Cold War types and British military and civilian types. There were specials from all over the world as well including a few Japanese WW2 ones. Valves ranged from tiny little things to a RD150YB that had to live in the garage, and a 6-anode mercury arc rectifier that was equally not allowed in the house, and for good reason too. The main collection grew to over 3,000 types, many of which had duplicates, so probably 4,000 in total. And then there were boxes of valves that did not warrant adding to the collection.
And so the collection continued to expand. While on holiday in the US friend in the US was discussing collecting trends with me and another collecting friend and said he collected US antique types, others collected microwave types and, pointing at me he said I collected everything and there is nothing wrong in that. But it made me think what exactly is my interest. And so I decided to concentrate on what I found most interesting – British military types, mainly in the CV, and A, N and V military series. The collection included a number of CRTs as well and eventually took over the whole garage.
I decided then to concentrate solely on CV types and trimmed the collection to 1,500 types, again with duplicates taking the collection to over 2,000 valves. Of the remainder many were sold and many hundreds went to the National Valve Museum which was nearly as old as my own.
Eventually though three things happened. First, it was becoming increasingly difficult to find new additions. Second, the website was now seeing fewer and fewer actual hits (as opposed to search engine spiders), and, most importantly I realised it had become an obsession. Time to quit. I also came to the realisation that I had an awful lot of valves in lots of boxes and I never even looked at any once they went into a box.
So I decided to close the website and sell off anything I could, donating the remainder to the National Valve Museum. The website was essentially converted to flat HTML files with none of the database behind them and taken over by a member of the BVWS. Of course, all praise to them for doing that, but none to me for all my years of work. Par for the course. In the past 20 years I received just a handful comments thanking me for providing the photographs and information about the collection. I was somewhat surprises at the screams when I announced the website was to close. Of course, I did not make the website for that, I did it because I thought people might actually be interested, and they clearly were back at the turn of the millennium but times change.
I was fortunate that someone local took many of the CRTs and a bunch of valves as well. Of the rest, a few hundred are destined for friends in Australia, the Netherlands, Belgium and Italy but the logistics are going to be a nightmare. Several hundred have found new homes here in the UK. Of the thousands left these went to the National Valve Museum with the more mundane radio and TV types being scrapped as no-one wanted to come and get them. I am keeping many of the early magnetrons for later sale, and some of the more decorative valves for, well, decoration!
There are still several boxes and a cupboard full of valves and they are destined to be scrapped. Selling on eBay as an individual has become more and more complex over the years so I will rarely sell there. As no-one was interested in paying me a visit to take them away they will end up in the dump.
At its height the collection took over half the workshop and half the garage. Once trimmed down to the CV types it was still half the workshop. Now it is all under one bench and I have more space to set up the various tools that have been sidelined for years and actually get back to working on the house.
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