Valves ⁽²⁾

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…

Seeing as I closed my valve collection website down and removed much of my personal stuff before it got archived (valvecollector.uk) I suppose I had better keep my story somewhere… I started collecting when I was just a kid but only seriously from about 1999 when I set up my first collection website, initially on a bit of webspace at work. From there it moved about a few times, first to some commercial webspace provided free by a friend who owned an ISP, then to our house, then past three other ISPs to a dedicated physical server which I rented, and then on to a VPS where it stayed until closed down and archived at the beginning of 2024. I used to collect just about everything but it got out of hand when the collection reached 3,000 types,some of which were huge beasts. From then I settled on just CV types and almost all of the non-CV valves - about 1,500 went to the National Valve Museum, which has a website almost as old as my own. I first became interested in valves, and electronics in general when I was about 8. My grandad drew a sine wave on the wall to try…