Faraday Museum – collection of historic equipment on display at Técnico celebrates eight years
Moisés Piedade, a retired Técnico professor, showcased some of the museum’s objects to visitors.
With a series of clicks and other mechanical sounds, a claw lifted a selected record and placed it correctly. The turntable needle gently landed on it, releasing the first chords of Chico Buarque’s song Último Blues sung by Gal Costa, which played on the jukebox in the middle of one of the rooms of the Faraday Museum at Instituto Superior Técnico. Oscillographs, oscilloscopes, signal generators, telephones, stereo recorders, valve radios, televisions, cameras, computers, integrated circuit boards, hearing aids, electricity meters and other equipment (some dating back to the 19th century) were in the same room of the partially dismantled jukebox, allowing those present to catch a glimpse of its internal mechanisms.
The visit took place on a special date – 6 February 2025, the eighth anniversary of the inauguration of this museum, located in the North Tower, at Técnico – Alameda campus. Moisés Piedade spared no surprises and, throughout the afternoon, presented the rooms full of devices relevant to the history of electricity, telecommunications and acoustics, among other areas. Retired in 2012, the Técnico professor is one of the founders of the Museum and one of the volunteers who takes care of its running. He calls himself a ‘collector of various types of objects’. Ever since he was a child, he was fascinated by the ability to record someone’s voice and, in the case of radio, by ‘how you could make a person’s voice come out of a box’.
The box, this time, was a 1962 Akai recorder. Moisés Piedade set the two reels spinning and a new theme began to play – Nachtrijders, a Dutch ode to the profession of lorry driver. ‘We have unique and very diverse objects’, said the professor, gesturing towards the recorder’s illuminated screens. ‘These items come from various fields such as physics, optics, electronics, chemistry… this isn’t just an electricity museum’, he added.
Originally from the village of Marquinho, in the municipality of Ansião, he developed a passion for manual labour and practical work, leading him to Técnico early in his academic journey. While studying at the Industrial Institute, he noticed that the classroom tables had cast iron sides featuring the Técnico coat of arms and he felt surprised. ‘Does this mean that people also create things at Técnico?’ he thought. Inspired by this detail he decided to join the school shortly afterwards.
From his desire to ‘do’ and ‘put into practice’ came a life full of projects, most recently his involvement in ISTSat-1, the first Portuguese university nano-satellite to be launched into space, entirely built at Técnico. After the launch, the work isn’t finished – two days before this conversation, he had been setting up a new remote control station for ISTSat-1, in order to avoid the electromagnetic noise that has been occurring at the Oeiras Pole campus station, where operations around the small satellite have been carried out.
Back on Earth, Dutch country music was still playing in the main room of the Faraday Museum. Moisés Piedade brought the tapes in the recorder to a standstill with the press of a button and headed for a different room, where the soundtrack would be different – a rapid succession of clicks as a small Tesla coil ionised the surrounding air. Miniature lightning bolts would instantly form on the tip of a vertical needle, filling the dark room with a purplish light and then disappearing. A brave visitor asked the professor if it was safe to move her hand closer, and did so after a nod from the professor.
‘Before the pandemic, the museum received more than 2,000 people a year,’ said Moisés Piedade, including “many children on school trips”. Waiting for the next visitors are objects such as the constant deviation spectrometer, the microwave educational kit, the Gramme dynamo and the Wehnelt cylinder, among other objects worthy of an episode of the Técnico podcast 110 Histórias, 110 Objetos (110 Stories, 110 Objects).
After eight years, the Faraday Museum is still open to the curious, with visits on Monday and Thursday afternoons and, above all, with lots of stories to tell.