Museum of Communication

The Communications Museum has wide-ranging displays that illustrate most of the ways in which people have exchanged ideas, from body language to the Internet, with the emphasis on people’s experiences rather than on technology. The galleries extend over 1000 sq m. A section called ‘Face to Face’ is concerned with language in its various forms, a subject on which the history of multi-lingual Switzerland is particularly enlightening. Postal communications are represented by a post coach that ran from Meiringen through Grimsel to Gletsch between 1894 and 1920, by a post bus, built by the Saurer company in 1939, and by a philatelic collection that numbers half a million stamps. There is a representation of a Morse telegraph office in Zurich in 1889, with news coming in from all over the world, and a manual exchange whose operator explains how she lost her job in the 1930s when it was replaced by automatic apparatus. A hundred historic Swiss radio and television broadcasts are available on a database and can be heard or viewed in the museum. The impact of computers is illustrated in a gallery called ‘As Time goes Byte’.