From Feathers to Fiber Optics
The Swiss Army Carrier Pigeon Service, a formal unit created on August 27, 1917, operated for 77 years until its dissolution in 1996. This service maintained a force of up to 30,000 pigeons to ensure communication across Switzerland's mountainous terrain. These birds, flying at an average speed of 60 kilometers per hour, could transport messages rolled into small capsules attached to their legs. The Museum of Communications preserves this history alongside older technologies. The collection contains a horse-drawn mail coach from 1894 that ran the Meiringen-Gletsch route and various postal uniforms from the 19th century.
The museum's holdings document the entire evolution of the Swiss post. Its collection includes 50,000 three-dimensional objects, from early telegraph equipment to articulated postal buses from 1973. The philately section is one of the world's largest, with about three million stamps. It features rare Swiss issues like the 1843 Double Geneva and the 1845 Basel Dove. These artifacts show the material science and engineering that supported national communication networks before the digital era.
The Interactive Present
The museum's core exhibition occupies 2,000 square meters and shifts focus to the user's interaction with technology. the space is filled with interactive stations. Visitors can attempt to breach a firewall in a hacking simulation or dub their own dialogue onto famous movie scenes in a film karaoke game. A pneumatic tube system allows people to write and send physical messages to different parts of the museum. This approach to exhibition design earned the museum the Council of Europe Museum Prize in 2019.
The collection also documents the rise of electronic and digital culture. It contains early radio and television broadcasting vans and studio equipment that show the infrastructure behind mass media. A dedicated section on digital history features an extensive collection of video game consoles, from early Atari systems to modern gaming computers. This part of the museum connects the principles of information transfer to the computational devices that define the 21st century. Human "communicators" are also part of the exhibition, staff trained to engage visitors in dialogue about the exhibits and their themes.