TCNJ showcase to breathe life into RCA tech relics

Last week, we reported on Camden’s rich history of technological firsts. If that story piqued your interest, have we got an event for you.

“Pretty much every consumer-electronics technology that we use everyday can trace its roots, in one way or another, to New Jersey — and many of them to RCA specifically,” said Benjamin Gross, curator of the Sarnoff Collection at The College of New Jersey (TCNJ) in Ewing, N.J.

This Friday, Gross is hosting a showcase of some of the collection’s 6,000+ objects. The cool part? TCNJ students have built new tech that breathes life into old tech.

You can watch vintage TV on one of the first-ever color television sets — by way of an augmented-reality app on your smartphone.
You can type a telegraph message and have it read back to you in Morse code — by way of an Arduino device.

“It gives people a chance to experience the object in a way that they wouldn’t otherwise have the chance to do,” Gross said. “Creative ways to tell the story of the history of electronics.”

The showcase kicks off at 5 p.m. at the Sarnoff Collection in Roscoe West Hall. The event is free and open to the public. Gross is expecting anywhere from 50 to 100 people to show up.

And, in the meantime, you can thumb through RCA’s many tech milestones with these interactive timelines made by TCNJ students.