In 1966 to celebrate 75 years of being the Philips company opened the Evoluon Centre at it's factory site at Eindhoven in the Netherlands. You can just make out '75' in the factory office building windows behind the saucer. It was used as an exhibition centre and built to resemble a flying saucer with a 77 meter diameter designed by Louis Kalf and Leo Bever. This activity's declined and was stopped in 1989 and it's use was changed to a conference centre. On the 123th Anniversary in 2014 it was used as a brain exhibition. A book Philips Research: 100 Years Of Inventions That Matter was also published.
1966 Philips special transistor radio
To mark the event Philips made and gave all it's staff a plastic flying saucer model radio that was an exact replica of the Evolution Centre. The silver ball at the centre is the tuning dial for Medium Wave reception and the wheel at the front is the on/off volume control. Very few of these radios come up for sale as the loyal workers are reluctant to part with them, or children broke them, so the resale price is quite high. After 7 years of searching for one of these, one turned up in Brazil of all places and the seller had only sold about 2 items on eBay in 10 years, so I was a little unsure that he really existed, anyway I fell to sleep the night the auction ended and missed it. Not long after that one turned-up at a post card fair (of all places) and a guy in Bromsgrove sold it to myself along with it's original blue box.
In the UK the Evoluon is chiefly remembered from Bert Haanstra's wordless short film entitled simply Evoluon, commissioned by Philips to publicise the museum, and shown as a trade test colour film on BBC television from 1968 to 1972.
No comments:
Post a Comment